One of the greatest benefits of cloud computing is availability of service. You want to be able to access your data anytime and anyplace. One of the older security threats to service availability is a DoS attack, or Denial of Service. This type of attack floods your network with communication requests and ultimately blocks legitimate users from accessing it. The newest wave of this style attack is the DDoS, or a distributed variation. Criminals take advantage of all internet-connected devices and use them as minions, or Botnets, to help bring down a network. So how can we help prevent attacks like these in the cloud?
Our partners at TierPoint have some suggestions:
- Detection — Like a tremor before an earthquake, a small DDoS attack may indicate something much larger is coming. Smaller attacks are used by criminals to ferret out the weaknesses in a system, but like a tremor, even these small attacks can be hard to detect manually. Since they are of shorter duration, they may just be written off as a glitch in the system. Detection of abnormally high traffic volume can be an indicator of potential attack.
- Scrubbing — Once an abnormally high volume of traffic is detected, the traffic is immediately shunted off to a scrubbing center where it can be analyzed using a sophisticated set of algorithms. Clean traffic is then passed back to the network.
- Annual Vulnerability & Penetration Testing — The power of the Botnets has rendered all networks vulnerable to a DDoS attack. The purpose of vulnerability and penetration testing is to detect the weaknesses in your network that might be exploited during a DDoS. Stronger networks make less attractive targets.
If you never want to worry about this style of attack, you could certainly just throw a ton of extra bandwidth at it, making it very difficult for cyber attackers to actually overcome your network. But that just isn’t an economical or realistic solution. The most effective method of protection from DDoS attacks is network monitoring. Whether you self-monitor or hire a monitoring expert to oversee your infrastructure, your traffic and data consumption need to be watched.
At Corporate Technologies Group, we are bandwidth experts. We know more isn’t always the solution. We believe you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and that is especially true when it comes to bandwidth. We have specialized solutions to ensure your data flow is not being interrupted by latency, packet loss, or jitter resulting from excessive or inappropriate resource use. We can help locate the source of your network issues before they become a problem for you, eliminating downtime and increasing productivity. Call us today to get your network performing optimally.
Download our Network Monitoring Overview White Paper to learn more.
