Basing on the current advancement in technology, the Internet has been a key hub for information. Many activities in day-to-day lives have been revolving around the Internet. The growth of the Internet, however, has presented many security risks to users. One of the major threats to Internet security is the distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) (US-CERT, 2018). To better understand DDOS attack, the discussion will base on the article by Xiao, Sun and Tasnuva (2017). This article provides a detailed explanation of what DDOS is and some highlights some vital statistics. The statistics herein are based on reported incidents reported from 2006 to 2017.
According to this article, the Internet is designed in a way that allows different users to share resources. For this reason, the behavior of one user may cause disturbances on other users. The goal of DDOS, therefore, is to create disturbances to the users in the network. Consequently, the network of other users may be slowed down or completely crippled by this attack. The DDOS attack is tracked and reported almost every day. These attackers mostly target small homes, businesses, and governments. According to the statistics by Kaspersky Lab (2017), 25% of these attacks are targeted on online shoppings. This is followed by gaming sites, stock exchanges, and banks with the rate of 20%, 13%, and 11% respectively.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
The aim of these attackers is to gain finances in an illegitimate way. These attackers are highly experienced technicians in the cyber field. Other reasons could be due to ideological beliefs. This reason is not more frequent, but some cases have been reported. A case in point is the Estonia attack in 2007 and WikiLeaks in 2010, which were motivated by ideological and political differences.
The article provides detailed strategies which attackers use to carry out an attack. The common method is where the attacker uses three different components. The components are the master, slaves and victims. The attacker starts by creating several masters using compromised machines. The attacker then installs malicious codes in the master devices which consequently send the same codes to the slave machines. After this process, they command the master to start the attack. With this strategy, the attacker is able to sabotage the victim in distributed ways. The attacker will then try to hide his identity using spoofed IP address.
To prevent a DDOS attack, several measures have to be put in place. The article postulates that to achieve this, organizations should use filters. This is a technique that prevents the victim from being reached by the attacker. Ingress filtering is the most popular filtering technique. This technique filters malicious traffic that is intended to the victim's network. The system used allows packets from a network whose domain is predetermined. If the hacker uses an IP address that has been spoofed that does not match the domain.
If the prevention strategy is not successful, mitigation strategy has to be developed to counter DDOS attack. The mitigation strategy uses three mechanisms which are detection, response, and toleration. Detection, in this case, refers to the identification of the attack. This can be identified if the system slows down. After the attack has been identified, the next step is to respond. This is important since it reduces the impact of the DDOS attack. The victim responds to this attack based on the results detected. For example, if the detection mechanisms identify and distinguish the attack, it will be reasonable to filter that attack.
In other cases, tolerance is used as a strategy for mitigation. It is possible in cases where the detection algorithm is not successful. The goal of this strategy is to minimize the impact minimize the impact of this attack.
It is important to note that most of the DDOS attacks have been carried out through the Internet. In modern-day technology, the Internet cannot be avoided in the name of preventing DDOS attacks. DDOS can cause significant loses if they are not detected and mitigated. However, the above-discussed strategies need to be implemented in order to avoid or minimize the impact of DDOS attacks.
References
Kaspersky Press (2017). Kaspersky lab report. Retrieved from: https://www.kaspersky.com/about/press-releases/2017_ddos-devastation-on-organizations-continues-to-climb
US-CERT (2018. United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team: Understanding Denial of Service Attack. Retrieved from: https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/tips/ST04-015
Xiao, Y., Sun, G. & Tasnuva, M. (2017). A survey of Distributed Denial of Service Attack, Prevention and Mitigation Techniques: International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks,13 (12).
