What is a DDoS Attack? Protection Methods and Solutions

What is a DDoS Attack?

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) is a type of cyber attack that aims to make a service unavailable by sending massive traffic from multiple sources simultaneously.

How DDoS Works

1. Botnet Creation: Attackers create a network of compromised computers.
2. Coordinated Attack: All bots send requests to the target simultaneously.
3. Resource Exhaustion: Server bandwidth, CPU, RAM resources are depleted.
4. Service Disruption: Server can no longer respond to legitimate users.

DDoS Attack Types

• Volume-Based: UDP Flood, ICMP Flood, DNS Amplification.
• Protocol-Based: SYN Flood, Ping of Death.
• Application Layer: HTTP Flood, Slowloris.

Protection Methods

1. DDoS Protection Service (Cloudflare, Akamai)
2. Rate limiting per IP
3. Web Application Firewall (WAF)
4. Anycast network
5. Excess bandwidth capacity
6. ISP coordination

Server-Level Protection

• iptables/firewalld for traffic blocking
• fail2ban for brute-force prevention
• ModSecurity WAF
• nginx rate limiting

We offer DDoS protection on our VDS server packages.