Types of DDOS attacks and how to prevent them

[mdabuhasan]

1. Introduction
Of all the cyber threats, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and their types are the most insidious and prevalent. According to a report, the number of DDoS attacks increased by 74% in 2022 compared to previous years. Fundamentally, the motive of the perpetrators or hackers of various types of DDoS attacks is to flood the target network or system with requests in order to hamper business operations or make the website/application inaccessible to its intended users. These attacks continue to evolve over time, making them more difficult to defend against. However, with the right strategies and a comprehensive understanding of these attacks, their impact can be mitigated. In this article, we will walk you through the various types of DDoS attacks and strategies to protect digital assets and maintain uninterrupted business operations in today's hyper-connected world.
Types of DDoS attacks
While the basic premise of all DDoS attacks is the same, to telegram data clog the victim’s IT infrastructure with traffic and hinder its operations, they can be implemented in different ways. These different types of DDoS attacks are categorized based on the network connection layer they target, which can drastically change the way they are detected and defended. Some common types of DDoS attacks and their real-world examples include:- **CLDAP Deduplication Attack**: One of the most common and deadly types of DDoS attacks, the impact of new vulnerabilities has skyrocketed 70 times in recent years. This attack targets the Connectionless Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP), which is an alternative to LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). In this attack, the attacker initiates LDAP server requests using a spoofed victim sender IP address. The vulnerable server then responds with an amplified response to the victim’s IP, resulting in a reflection attack. In 2020, Amazon Web Services Inc. successfully avoided a distributed denial of service of 2.3 terabytes per second, the largest hit in the history of DDoS attacks. According to AWS, the attack was based on a CLDAP DDoS reflection attack, which floods the target with a large number of requests, carefully planned to disrupt the operation of an application or website. - **Memcached DDoS attack**: Like all other DDoS attack types, a Memcached DDoS attack is also an attack in which a threat actor overwhelms the target server with Internet traffic. In this attack, attackers use spoofed IP addresses to exploit vulnerable UDP memcached servers with small-scale queries to obtain amplified responses, making it appear that the requests came from the victim itself. In 2018, a DDoS attack targeted GitHub, an online code management platform used by developers around the world. The attack drove GitHub's servers crazy with traffic as high as 1.35 Tbps. The source of the attack was traced to more than a thousand different autonomous systems (ASNs) distributed across tens of thousands of endpoints. - **HTTP flood attack**: Also known as a layer 7 DDoS attack, it uses seemingly legitimate HTTP GET or POST requests to bring down a server or application. This type of DDoS attack relies on a botnet, a network of compromised computers controlled by a single entity. Because the attackers used standard URL requests, the forged traffic was nearly indistinguishable from valid traffic. - **HTTPS DDoS attack**: A notable example saw attackers use multiple addresses to generate more than 46 million requests per second, 76% higher than the previously reported record, causing disruptions to Google's infrastructure and services.