Building and Maintaining a Denial of Service Defense for Businesses

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have been around for decades but still cause problems for most businesses. While easy to launch, DDoS attacks can be difficult to sustain and even more difficult to monetize for attackers. From the business perspective, a DDoS attack might result in lost revenue but is unlikely to have the same long term impact that a data breach may have. Recent changes in the IT landscape have made DDoS a more attractive attack vector for hackers. The industry trend to connect more and more devices to the Internet (often with minimal to no security), dubbed the 'Internet of Things' has created a new marketplace for bad actors to sell their resource exhaustion services. Businesses need to consider all options when planning and implementing a defensive posture against denial of service attacks. As security vendors continue to offer new (and expensive) options to defend against these attacks, how does an InfoSec manager know which is best for their business. Using an 'Offense informs the Defense' approach, this paper will analyze the methods used during DDoS attacks in order to determine the most appropriate defensive postures.