Don’t Let DDoS Ruin You in 2022!
Organizations always want to kick off a new year with commitment and resolve, whether it is to increase revenue, create new product versions, or reduce their overall risk. For CISOs and their staff and colleagues in the IT world, the intention to do better this year is perhaps most intense on January 2 when everyone officially kicks off Q1. They’ve weathered the previous year, for better or worse, but they know there is always room for improvement in cybersecurity and risk mitigation.
Delivering an ongoing threat to business continuity and security, (Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks) continued their menace through 2021, with a tsunami of ransom-driven attacks, and are showing no signs of abating. So, one thing that should be at the top of every organization’s cyber to-do list, is to ensure their DDoS defenses are up to date. It’s not enough to say you “checked that box” in early 2021, or back in 2020; the cyber threat landscape is continually evolving, as is the technology to prevent such attacks. Make sure that your defenses are optimized. Ask yourself the following questions:
Is our DDoS defense system automated?
Can your IT staff manually distinguish between good traffic and bad DDoS traffic? No. Can they track and respond to shifting attack vectors? No. Manual DDoS mitigation is ineffective because the vast majority of DDoS attacks are short, sub-saturating, and able to evade legacy protection. Make sure your organization is protected by a DDoS solution that can automatically and accurately block virtually all known and unknown attacks, without any human intervention. That’s way better than any security analyst team could ever achieve.
Can we handle multi-vector attacks?
In today’s cyber landscape it’s crucial to fight automated attacks with automated defenses because cybercriminals are also using automation – launching multi-vector attacks that change frequently (within minutes or seconds). Traffic threshold-based defenses are out; heuristics and closed-loop policies are in. Your DDoS defenses must include rapid filter creation and automatic deployment, responding dynamically to the evolving nature of today’s sophisticated multi-vector attacks. And, of course, automated defenses mean that you don’t have to dedicate staff to handling DDoS attacks; you can either reduce your staffing costs or re-assign those staff to other value-add responsibilities.
Are our defenses effective in real-time?
Business continuity is critical for organizations that operate online. Automatic protection gives any security team the confidence to know that attacks will be detected and stopped, instantly, preventing any online application or service downtime. For telecom companies, it is crucial to block all DDoS traffic from entering their network and eliminate attacks before they can congest the network and impact downstream customers.
Is our protection always-on?
We know that security analysts hardly ever rest – cybersecurity is a 24/7 operation – but they are human, after all. Unfortunately, many legacy DDoS solutions rely heavily on intervention from security analysts to deal with suspected DDoS traffic. As a result, responses to attacks may be slow, and even if the analyst is relatively fast, they may still have to redirect traffic for the attack target via a cloud scrubbing service, which can take minutes, or even tens of minutes. During that time most of the damage is already done, with attacks blocking access to applications or degrading network performance. Additionally, re-routing customer traffic across the Internet to third-party scrubbing creates disruption, adds risk, and can be very costly.
Can we stop zero-day attacks?
Many DDoS mitigation solutions can’t automatically defend against zero-day attacks because they don’t have intelligent mechanisms for blocking vectors that haven’t been seen before in the wild. Most DDoS solutions rely solely on rigid or historical filters, requiring an attack type to have been seen previously to defend against it. So, make sure you are using one which includes heuristics and machine learning that enable dynamic responses to attacks, even those that haven’t been seen previously.
A New Year, a better year
2022 can be a better, more successful year for your organization’s cybersecurity. Remove the risks of the past by taking steps now to ensure a safer, more secure future. Cybersecurity pros want peace of mind just like everyone else, and the proper DDoS defense system can help you achieve that state, with enhanced security and increased business continuity assurance.
For over a decade, Corero has been providing state-of-the-art, highly-effective, real-time automatic DDoS protection solutions for enterprise, hosting and service provider customers around the world. Our SmartWall® DDoS mitigation solutions protect on-premise, cloud, virtual and hybrid environments. For more on Corero’s flexible deployment models, click here. If you’d like to learn more, please contact us.