DDoS Mitigation Guide

🔍 What is a DDoS Attack?

DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. It is a type of cyberattack where a malicious actor overwhelms a server, service, or network with a massive amount of traffic from multiple sources (often a botnet), causing the system to slow down or become completely inaccessible.

📌 Key Characteristics:

• Traffic floods come from many compromised devices (distributed sources).
• It aims to exhaust resources like bandwidth, CPU, memory, or web server connections.
• It affects availability, making websites or services temporarily offline.

🚨 Types of DDoS Attacks

🛡️ How to Mitigate and Protect Against DDoS

DDoS mitigation involves detecting, absorbing, and blocking malicious traffic before it harms your system. Here's how:

✅ 1. Use a DDoS Protection Service (Recommended)

DDoS protection services detect and mitigate traffic before it reaches your servers.

🔹 Popular Services:

💡 Benefits:

• Global edge networks filter traffic before reaching origin.
• Auto-scaling, traffic inspection, and bot filtering.
• Can mitigate even large-scale attacks without downtime.

✅ 2. Use a Web Application Firewall (WAF)

A WAF protects your application layer (HTTP/HTTPS) by filtering malicious requests.

• Many DDoS services include WAF features.
• You can also use open-source or cloud WAFs like:
  • ModSecurity (for Apache/Nginx)
  • NAXSI
  • Cloudflare WAF

✅ 3. Rate Limiting and Traffic Throttling

Limit the number of requests allowed from a single IP over a given time frame.

• Prevents HTTP floods and brute-force login attempts.
• Implemented at:
  • Web server level (Nginx, Apache)
  • Application level (middleware, controllers)
  • Cloud proxy (e.g., Cloudflare rate limiting)

✅ 4. Geo-blocking and IP Blacklisting

• Block traffic from countries or IPs that are not part of your audience.
• Use threat intelligence feeds to block known malicious IPs.
• Cloud services allow real-time blacklisting.

✅ 5. Network-Level Protections

For on-premise infrastructure:

• Firewalls: Configure rules to drop suspicious packets.
• Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS): Monitor traffic anomalies.
• Router Filters: Set access control lists (ACLs) and traffic filtering.

✅ 6. Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDNs cache and serve your static content from global locations, reducing load on your origin server and absorbing attack traffic.

• Providers: Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, AWS CloudFront

✅ 7. High Availability and Redundancy

• Use load balancers and replicated servers across multiple regions or data centers.
• Implement auto-scaling to handle traffic surges.

🔄 DDoS Mitigation Strategy Checklist

🧠 Summary

🧩 Final Note

DDoS attacks are not just a technical problem, but a business continuity risk. Investing in layered DDoS protection ensures your services remain available, secure, and resilient, even during high-risk situations.