What is DDoS mitigation?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to make an online service unavailable to users, typically by interrupting or temporarily suspending the services of its hosting server. The term "DDoS mitigation" refers to the process of successfully protecting a target against a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This article offers us mitigation techniques against a DDoS attack.

What are the mitigation techniques?

A typical mitigation process can be broadly defined by several steps. For more information, have a peek below. The first begins with identifying traffic flow discrepancies that may signal the build-up of a DDoS attack. Effectiveness is measured by your ability to recognize an attack as early as possible. Then the stage of the diversion. Here traffic is rerouted away from its target via Domain Name System (DNS) or Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing, and a decision is made whether to filter it or reject it altogether. DNS routing is always on, so it can respond quickly to attacks and is effective against both application layer and network layer attacks. BGP routing is either permanent or on demand. DDoS traffic is eliminated, usually by identifying patterns that instantly distinguish between legitimate traffic and malicious visitors. Responsiveness is a function of your ability to block an attack without interfering with your users' experience. The goal is for your solution to be completely transparent to site visitors. Finally, the analyzes of the system help to gather information about the attack, both to identify the offender (s) and to improve future resilience. Advanced security analysis techniques can provide granular visibility into attack traffic and instant understanding of attack details.

Choose a mitigation provider

There are several other key aspects that you should consider when choosing a mitigation provider. Network capacity remains a great way to assess a DDoS mitigation service. It reflects the overall scalability available to you during an attack. Most cloud-based mitigation services offer multi-Tbps network capacity, far beyond what an individual customer might need.