The Risk DDoS Attacks Pose to Enterprises

The Role of the Firewall

A Firewall is a necessary first step in protecting an enterprise network by establishing a barrier between a trusted, secure internal network and another outside untrusted network such as the Internet. Firewalls have evolved considerably over the years, with the advent of next-generation firewalls to add application-aware filtering and intrusion detection capabilities and help customers improve their first line of defense. However, DDoS attacks are one vector where Firewalls are commonly the point of failure. In fact, Radware’s own research shows that the firewall is the cause of downtime during DDoS attacks roughly one-third of the time. The reason for this is the stateful nature of these devices, required to keep track of open sessions and transactions on the network. Maintaining session state requires use of session tables as well as other CPU resources that are finite and also responsible for other security features. Therefore under attack, the session table can be exhausted causing the firewall to fail.