Introduction of DDoS Attacks

Distributed Denial-of-Service or known as DDoS attacks endeavor to deny service to valid users through devastating the target with some activities. The most usual technique is a  attack contrary to the Web providers, where disseminated defines that several resources are attacking the similar target at once. These type of attacks are frequently performed throughout the botnets (Yu, 2013).

DDoS attacks have been growing bigger each year. A report from 2013 mentioned that the biggest attack bulk emaciated at . In the year of 2014, there was even an attack with above than  in attack bulk. DDoS attacks could be really disturbing in which many companies are impacted within the hour’s duration. Moreover, these attacks are getting further complicated and altering the techniques applied to make the attacks. Thus, it would make it harder to diminish the DDoS attacks (cloudflare.com, n.d.).

In this article, we are going to explore what reasons that are responsible for increasing DDoS attacks throughout the years, and also suggest essential detection and defense mechanism to, at least, lessen the attacks.

Reasons that are Responsible for Increasing DDoS Attacks throughout the Years

The clearest result of DDoS attacks is that the service of targeted would not be accessible for valid users. On the other hand, the reasons that made hackers to perform DDoS attacks, and increasing these attacks throughout the years are as mentioned below (Wueest, 2014).

Profit and Blackmail of DDoS Attacks

            To gain the profit from blackmail is one of the most rational reasons for the increasing of DDoS attacks. In this scenario, the hackers will blackmail the target, and demand for the payment or their online service would be offline for some times. An example of this was a DDoS attack against one of the US companies which conducted in April 2014, that time, the hacker demanded the company to give  to remove the DDoS attack.

Distraction of DDoS Attacks

These DDoS attacks are also able to be used to distract the target from the actual attack, or else to make the resources of target busy. The purpose of this type of attack is to distract the host CERT team while an actual attack is conducting. In addition to this, a DDoS attack also able to be used to avert the users. According to a report by Neustar, which conducted in 2013,  of victims of this type of attack were experiencing data theft and another attack at once.

Hacktivism of DDoS Attacks One of the hacktivist coo

 One of the hacktivist

        peratives is Anonymous which have posed the main risk of attacks in current times. Hacktivist communities frequently leak their purpose before the attack, with a purpose to exploit the publicity throughout the attack. For example, the DarkSeoul group which attacked South Korea right at its 63^rd anniversary.

Security Damage of DDoS Attacks

At times, the DDoS attacks are considered to be accidental and were not conducted with any malevolent intent. For example, a malware model which might utilize a domain-generating algorithm (DGA) to produce URLs as of where to download some updates. In case if a valid company appears to share a similar domain, then they will potentially receive an accidental DDoS attack from the entire users who are trying to download the update which available on their we Essential Detection and Defense Mechanism to 

Removing a DDoS attack is frequently not simple, and completely relies on how crucial the online access along with the company’s service. However, there are some steps that we can perform to detect DDoS attacks along with the defense mechanism (Wueest, 2014).

Blacklist the Resources of DDoS Attacks

Even though blacklisting the resource could be quite difficult if in the case where a hacker uses the tricked resource, but this step would able to help lessen the portion of DDoS attack.

Do Not Act As the Source of DDoS Attacks

Secure your company’s servers and also arrange them accurately. Install some patches and strengthen your company’s systems with a purpose so that the systems would not negotiate and include to a botnet. In addition to this, you can also avert DNS provider from performing as a free resolver and inactivate the  command on NTP servers within your company.

DDoS Defense Mechanism

Once DDoS attack occurs there is no further method to do but detaching the victim out from the network, and addressing the issue manually to remove the attack. Therefore, a defense mechanism is quite essential to make sure that the system is away of danger commencing DDoS attack.

There are some types of defense mechanisms for DDoS attacks mentioned (Sadhu, et al., 2015) such as:

·         Source-based mechanism: organizing the defense mechanism close to the source

·         Destination-based mechanism: defense mechanism is installed at the attack’s destination

·         Network-based mechanism: mechanisms are installed inside of a network

·         Hybrid mechanism: a collaboration based mechanism between servers along with the users to mark and response to DDoS attack