All organizations with an online presence or dependence on Internet-based systems need to fortify their defenses against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks—which can disrupt online services and applications—
have been cited as the number-one operational security problem facing the service provider community today1. In a recent Forrester survey, 74 percent of respondents reported experiencing a DDoS attack in the 12-month period ending
March 2009.2 In 2009, organizations experienced more than 350,000 DDoS attacks3, affecting businesses with critical online applications across all vertical and market segments.
Attacks are also becoming larger, with peak DDoS attack size growing from about 400 Mbps in 2001 to over 49 Gbps in 2009. Every 26 minutes, on average, an organization comes under an attack larger than 1 Gbps, and every 190 minutes
an attack takes place that’s larger than10 Gbps4. At the same time, 58 percent of networks surveyed by Forrester reported increased attack complexity and a greater focus on application availability5. With botnets available for rent at $100 per day or less,6 anybody with a grudge or an agenda can easily obtain the computing power they need to launch a DDoS attack, on a scale that will easily overwhelm most organizations.
DDoS can cost an organization in tangible losses and in more subtle ways—whether it has been attacked or whether it is just dedicating resources to defend against an attack. An attack that effectively impacts target systems disrupts the
revenue from these systems for the duration of the attack, often with residual effects. Additionally, once the attack is over, the interruption to an organization’s service can inflict lasting damage on its reputation, as well as negatively impacting customer satisfaction and trust.
A denial-of-service (DoS) attack occurs when traffic is sent from one host to another computer with the intent of disrupting an online application or service.
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack occurs when multiple hosts (such as compromised PCs) are leveraged to carry out and amplify an attack. Attackers usually create the denial-of-service condition by either consuming server bandwidth or by impairing the server itself. Typical targets include Web servers, DNS servers, application servers, routers, firewalls, and Internet bandwidth.
Even if an organization has never been attacked, both the far-reaching effects and high probability of DDoS means it will still need to take steps to protect against potential attacks. Keeping up with the DDoS arms race requires spending on bandwidth, hardware, and expertise. If an organization’s most critical assets are in some way tied to its online availability, then it needs to ensure that availability by protecting against DDoS attacks, both at the network and application layer.
Every organization needs to weigh all these costs in order to select the right DDoS mitigation strategy. It should estimate how much damage a DDoS attack could cause by calculating how much each minute of downtime costs for each of its most critical Internet-facing assets, estimating the probability and projected rate of occurrence of such incidents, and then using those numbers to decide on a budget. Once the organization has decided how much protection it wants and how much it can spend, it is ready to consider the features and costs of the different approaches to DDoS mitigation— traditional on-premises filtering, on-premises or ISP-based intelligent filtering, and cloud-based services—to get the maximum protection from that investment.
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