DDoS Attacks on Enterprises Surge

 Large-Scale Assaults Demand High Sophistication and Vast Botnets

“The weakest point in the enemy’s position must be sought out and attacked with the greatest determination.”
Carl von Clausewitz

DDoS attacks exploit two main concepts:

Focus – Find a vulnerability on the victim’s side and direct all of your attack power toward it.
Amplification – Use resources from other hosts on the internet to boost your attack.

There are mainly four types of DDoS attacks: Volume, Infrastructure (protocol), Application, and Advanced.

Volume attacks are fairly simple—many machines worldwide send large amounts of data to the target, saturating its bandwidth. It’s one of the most mature and well-known attack types, and many vendors are adept at mitigating it.

High traffic volume is typically achieved by amplifying requests through vulnerable servers on the internet that rely on the stateless UDP protocol. These servers accept a small request from the attacker but respond with large data packets aimed at the victim. This technique is also known as a “reflection attack.”

Infrastructure (protocol) attacks exploit the characteristics of a protocol to overwhelm the victim’s resources. For example, an SSL Renegotiation attack forces the server to generate a new key and encrypt it using a costly asymmetric algorithm, potentially saturating the server’s CPU and preventing it from handling new requests. Sending numerous such requests from diverse sources can effectively cause a DoS on the server.

Application attacks target limitations or flaws within the application itself. For instance, consider a typical “contact us” form. Under normal conditions, a few requests per day is a good sign of customer interest. However, if the form suddenly receives hundreds of thousands of requests per minute, the server may be unable to handle the load and could crash.

Advanced attacks combine all the aforementioned techniques with deeper research into the victim’s mitigation capabilities to create bypass strategies. For example, attackers may test each mitigation threshold and then launch a large-scale attack that remains just below the configured defense rate.

Enterprises often have robust protections that are generally well configured and monitored. However, they still need controlled DDoS attack simulations to confirm that comprehensive protection is applied across all assets with the correct policies. This is where our CaosBlitz solution comes in.

When we conduct a controlled DDoS Simulation with CaosBlitz, we study the mitigation thresholds, pinpoint vulnerable areas across application, infrastructure, and volume-based defenses, and then provide a detailed DDoS resiliency report along with mitigation recommendations drawn from our experience.

The overall exposure is measured by the complexity level of the attack multiplied by the size of the botnet required to disrupt the service.

Learn more about DDoS attacks and simulations from one of our experts

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