Leveraging the Load Balancer to Fight DDoS

Can Load Balancing hardware traditionally used to help scale servers also help against DDoS attacks? Many DDoS mitigation techniques traditionally focus on either getting help from the upstream ISP or reconfiguring the end servers that are getting attacked. Many people forget that the load balancing hardware that typically lives in between the edge routers and end servers may have features that can help fight against a DDoS attack. In fact, some common load balancing features have unintended benefits that can help fight against DDoS attacks. This paper will explain some common DDoS attack methods currently seen today and describe different methods for dealing with them by leveraging the load balancing hardware commonly found in web-hosted environments.