With the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the headlines, several businesses have been quick to find out if they are protected properly by their present safety strategies. They have been seeking answers from their hosting and cloud providers.
Regrettably, the very scale and size of the data center or hosting operator network infrastructure and their vast client-base puts forth an unbelievably smart attack façade because of the countless entry points and considerable aggregate bandwidth that behaves like a conduit for a disruptive and damaging DDoS attack. With enterprises growing all the more dependent on critical hosted services or infrastructure, they are positioning themselves at a higher risk due to these devastating cyber threats.
Secondhand DDoS
A cloud-oriented data center’s multi-tenant feature can be less than tolerant for unwary tenants. A big DDoS attack against a tenant can result in devastating effects on others. The high malicious traffic on a single tenant during a massive attack can have bad effects on the others in addition to affection for the overall operation of the data center. Actually, it’s common that hacks on just one service or tenant can fully block up the shared bandwidth and infrastructure resources. This will lead to the complete data center getting very slow or offline, which is also called secondhand DDoS. And, such attacks are rather tough to detect, and by the time it gets detected, a lot of damage could be done.
A Simple Protection against DDoS
Black-hole routing or black-holing is simple and common protection against such attacks. This aims at mitigating the indirect target, secondhand DDoS. In this method, the hosting or cloud vendor blocks all packets intended for a domain by promoting a null path for the IP address under attack.
There are many issues with using this method against DDoS. One of the main problems is the case where several tenants share a range of public IP addresses. In such a situation, all clients related to the address range under threat will be unable to get all services, irrespective of whether or not they were the particular target. Effectively, the data center operator has completed the job of the attacker by fully DoS’ing their clients.
DDoS Attacks Are Increasingly Grave for Enterprises
The increasing reliance on the Internet makes the effect of successful DDoS hacks even grave for enterprises, government agencies, and service providers. The more powerful and newer DDoS tools may lead to even more devastating hacks in the coming days. Zero-day vulnerabilities in new versions of programs like WordPress are often targeted by hackers to exploit the customers using outdated versions.
Enterprises that depend on hosted services or infrastructure have to begin finding out more about the security offered by their data center or hosting providers in case of such attacks. It’s important to know how to prevent DDoS attacks. In many situations, the hosted clients just depend on their service provider to handle the attacks when they happen without actually understanding the consequences of ignoring such malicious acts.
As for the providers, they need to have a complete range of defense deployed against such cyber threats, thus safeguarding your clients from devastating attacks originating from or directed at your network.
