Countermeasures against DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks involve a combination of preventive strategies, detection mechanisms, and mitigation techniques to ensure service continuity. Here’s a breakdown with examples and relevant cloud solutions:
1. Preventive Measures
- Traffic Filtering: Use firewalls or access control lists (ACLs) to block malicious traffic patterns. For example, configure rules to drop packets from known botnet IP ranges.
- Rate Limiting: Restrict the number of requests a single IP can send within a time frame. Example: Limit login attempts to 5 per minute per IP.
- Redundancy & Load Balancing: Distribute traffic across multiple servers to prevent overload. Example: Deploy applications across multiple geographic regions.
2. Detection & Monitoring
- Anomaly Detection: Use AI/ML tools to identify unusual traffic spikes (e.g., sudden 10x increase in requests).
- Real-Time Alerts: Set up monitoring systems (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana) to notify teams of abnormal traffic patterns.
3. Mitigation Techniques
- CDN & Edge Protection: Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) absorb and filter DDoS traffic before it reaches origin servers. Example: A CDN like Tencent Cloud’s EdgeOne distributes traffic globally and blocks malicious requests at the edge.
- DDoS Protection Services: Cloud providers offer specialized DDoS mitigation services. Example: Tencent Cloud Anti-DDoS Pro automatically detects and filters large-scale attacks, ensuring business continuity.
- Scrubbing Centers: Third-party services clean malicious traffic before forwarding legitimate requests to your servers.
4. Incident Response
- Automated Failover: Switch to backup servers or data centers during an attack.
- Blackholing: Temporarily route attack traffic to a null route (last-resort measure).
Example: A gaming company facing a UDP flood attack can use Tencent Cloud Anti-DDoS Advanced to mitigate the attack while keeping gameplay servers online.
For cloud-based solutions, Tencent Cloud provides integrated DDoS protection (e.g., Anti-DDoS Pro, EdgeOne) with automatic scaling and real-time threat intelligence.