Smart DDoS Protection During the COVID-19 Crisis


The ongoing effects of the coronavirus pandemic are creating a significant impact on businesses worldwide. While some industries have been severely hit, others are experiencing sudden and exponential growth in demand for their services.

Sadly, this difficult time offers no reprieve from cyber criminals who are using this crisis as an opportunity to attack critical infrastructure. With customers, patients and citizens relying on critical services now more than ever, these attacks emphasize the importance of protecting infrastructure and ensuring service availability.

As organizations are adjusting to these challenging times, they need to make sure they are adapting their security as well. This includes increasing protection capacity to ensure the surge in legitimate traffic is secured, safeguarding remote access infrastructure through virtual private networks (VPNs) and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), and protecting cloud-based environments which are being quickly scaled up due to increasing demand.

[You may also like: Seven L7 DDoS Attacks to Watch Out For]

Five Critical Capabilities for Protection

Behavioral-based detection. As spikes in traffic for videoconferencing, telemedicine and governmental websites show, organizations need a way of distinguishing between malicious traffic and legitimate traffic spikes. During periods of massive flash crowds, it is critical that your distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) defenses leverage behavioral-based detection methods to distinguish between attackers and legitimate users.

Real time signature creation. It is critical that DDoS defense signatures are tailored to the exact characteristics of incoming attack traffic. If you apply a signature too narrowly, no attack traffic will be stopped. If you apply a signature that is too broad, legitimate user traffic will be blocked. A traditional DDoS solution relying on rate limiting will not be able to distinguish between legitimate and attack traffic.

Encrypted attack protection. More than 90% of web traffic is now HTTPS encrypted. While HTTPS is crucial for data protection, it opens the door for new DDoS attacks. HTTPS requires many more resources from the target server than the client, meaning hackers can unleash devastating attacks with limited requests. Protection against encrypted DDoS floods is a critical requirement for modern DDoS protection.

Massive global capacity. Internet of things (IoT) botnets are growing larger and more sophisticated and becoming more capable of launching larger attacks. They can be purchased on the darknet for relatively small sums. Botnets are a significant threat during a massive public health emergency such as the COVID-19 crisis. Therefore, a globally distributed DDoS scrubbing network with multi-terabit DDoS scrubbing capacity is critical for protection.

[You may also like: What To Consider When Evaluating DDoS Mitigation Services]

Managed security services. Staff shortages and the cybersecurity skill gap are crucial problems, but they become exacerbated during a crisis when IT teams are overextended and many employees work remotely. Using a fully managed security service for DDoS protection takes the burden off your shoulders by relying on network and application security experts.

Read Radware’s “2019-2020 Global Application & Network Security Report” to learn more.

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