One common tactic that many security practitioners have witnessed is carrying out distributed denial-of-service attacks during peak business times, when companies are more likely to be short-staffed and caught unawares.
While DDoS attacks are a year-round threat, we've noticed an uptick in attacks during the holiday season.
In 2022, Microsoft mitigated an average of 1,435 attacks every day.
These attacks spiked on Sept. 22, 2022, with approximately 2,215 attacks recorded, and continued at a higher volume until the last week of December.
We saw a lower volume of attacks from June through August.
The high traffic volumes and high revenues earned by organizations during this peak business season also make this time of year even more appealing for attackers.
Cybercriminals often take advantage of this opportunity to attempt to execute lucrative attacks at little cost.
With a cybercrime-as-a-service business model, a DDoS attack can be ordered from a DDoS subscription service for as little as $5. Meanwhile, small and midsize organizations pay an average of $120,000 to restore services and manage operations during a DDoS attack.
Knowing this, security teams can take proactive measures to help defend against DDoS attacks during peak business seasons.
Understanding the Different Types of DDoS Attacks Before we get into how to defend against DDoS attacks, we must first understand them.
There are three main categories of DDoS attacks and a variety of different cyberattacks within each category.
Attackers can use multiple attack types - including ones from different categories - against a network.
One example of a protocol attack could be a synchronization packet flood attack that consumes all available server resources, thus making a server unavailable.
The final category of DDoS attacks is resource layer attacks.
3 Proactive Measures to Help Defend Against DDoS Attacks It's impossible for organizations to completely avoid being targeted by DDoS attacks.
You can take a number of proactive steps to help strengthen your defenses in the event of an attack.
Make sure you're protected: Next, make sure you're deploying a DDoS protection service with advanced mitigation capabilities that can handle attacks at any scale.
Create a DDoS response strategy: Finally, create a DDoS response strategy to guide teams in the event of an attack.
This team should understand how to identify, mitigate, and monitor an attack and be prepared to coordinate with internal stakeholders and customers.
By preparing for DDoS attacks, organizations can help ensure they're ready to meet the threat head on.
This Cyber News was published on www.darkreading.com. Publication date: Wed, 27 Dec 2023 14:10:21 +0000