The digital development of our world brought in a certain level of comfort regarding data usage. All the operations can be performed regardless of the location, or time, which provides the highest level of efficiency ever. However, such a level of accessibility created a serious issue – hacker attacks that target the sensitive data of businesses, organizations, and individuals.
One of the most common forms of cyber attacks is DDoS attacks, which have a temporary yet quite detrimental impact on the functioning of the organization. How to prevent DDoS attacks and protect the working environment from intrusion? Let’s explore together.
What Are the DDoS Attacks?
DDoS attacks are a widespread form of cybercrime that aims to disable certain online services by interrupting the functioning of their hosting servers. DDoS attacks are often used interchangeably with DoS, yet, their functional patterns are different.
DoS Attack – a Denial of Service attack is based on sending massive amounts of traffic to a victimized computer aiming to crash its system. As a result, a website is unavailable for the users. The attack can be performed from a single computer.
DDoS Attack – a Distributed denial of service has the same aim, yet, the attack is performed from various locations through many systems. DDoS attacks are much faster than DoS, and they require a whole system of computers, called botnets.
Types of DoS and DDOS Attacks
Volume-based
Volume-based attacks include spoofed-packet floods like UDP floods, İCMP floods, etc. Their main goal is to fill up the bandwidth so the users can receive the proper experience. It is measured in Bits per second (bps) and Gigabits per second (Gbps). It is typically performed by bots.
Protocol Attacks
Protocol attacks the network layer, consuming the server resources or intermediate communication tools like firewalls, and load balancers. It is measured in packets per second (Pps).
Application Layer Attacks
These attacks target the performance of the web server. It includes low-and-slow attacks, GET/POST floods, and targets Apache, Windows, or OpenBSD vulnerabilities. It is measured in Requests per second (Rps).
How to protect?
One of the best ways to protect web resources from DoS and DDoS attacks is the usage of dedicated protection service providers. The two most common options are Gcore DDoS protection and CloudFlare, as apart from handling the DDoS attacks, they offer other useful and advanced features related to cloud services, IoT, etc.
Gcore Security Solutions
Gcore is a top-performance vendor that provides server- and web application-level DDoS protection, and last-generation cloud infrastructure. Gcore offers protection to up to three layers of attacks, mainly the L3 – the network, the L4 – the transport layers, and the L7 – the application layer. Besides, it has developed a real-time bot protection, and an advanced next-generation firewall (HGFW).
The main characteristics:
- Geographical extension – over 140 points of presence over 5 continents.
- Over 1Tbps of total filtering capacity.
- Datacenter protection with Protected IP Transit service.
- HTTP/2, IPv6, and web sockets support.
- The false positive rate is less than 0,01%
- Blocking of traffic that targets the victimized website and API.
- Focus on session-blocking rather than individual IP addresses.
- Packaged offerings from Gcore, which include streaming platforms and global hosting.
The Gcore security platforms offer scrubbing services around the world, which provides its clients with uninterrupted work online even during a DDoS attack, thus guaranteeing no delays in digital business.
Gcore pricing is highly customizable, as apart from standard packaging they consider the individual demand of every client. Those who are interested in top-class performance and protection should contact the Gcore assistants for further help and explanations.
Cloudflare Security Solutions
Cloudflare is a cloud-based DDoS protection system that can withstand layer 3 and layer 4 attacks. It helps to protect websites, applications, and the whole network environment, making sure the traffic is not compromised.
The main characteristics:
- Provides protection for FTP, SSH, VoIP, gaming, or any other application functioning on TCP/UDP protocol.
- Build-in load balancing and traffic acceleration for L4 traffic.
- Cloudlar Magic Transit provides BGP-based DDoS protection in two modes – deployment and on-demand.
- Data centers in 250 cities all over the world.
- DDoS attack mitigation in under 3 seconds.
- Built-in analytics
- Seamless integration with third-party SIENs.
Pricing policies come in standard and customizable options.
Gcore vs Cloudflare
Gcore and CloudFlare are both efficient solutions for protecting the user’s web resources against DDoS attacks.
Gcore is a superior provider of security and cloud solutions on a global scale. It allows businesses and individuals to build their web resources within a highly efficient and secure environment, delivering cutting-edge connectivity, innovative solutions, and constant development of its performance. Gcore is an all-in-one solution to help you create, develop, and maintain functionality and keep its safety under control.
Cloudflare is another provider of security in the business infrastructure. They offer an extensive geography of their servers, as well as multiple forms of data protection. It is a viable option for both, individual users and large enterprises.
Despite both of them being the global leading vendors, we would opt for Gcore services due to their all-embracing nature, as apart from creating a security environment for organizations or individuals, it can actually help to build and develop the whole IT cloud infrastructure as well.
