Denial of Service Attacks: Types & Impact - Essay Sample

Introduction

Denial of service attacks is becoming more popular, especially with technological advancement giving hackers new tools to accomplish an attack mission. Denial of service attacks are incredibly destructive, and the majority have targeted IT services, software as service companies, including cloud computing providers. There exist no standard way of classifying the denial of service attacks. However, depending on their nature, they can be categorised into the protocol, volumetric, or application attacks.

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Moreover, organisations, including medium-sized and small businesses, should plan and prepare for denial of service attacks. Therefore, companies should redesign their network architectures, hardware specifications, security application, as well as policies to address and mitigate these cyber-security threats. Besides, network security should be considered and implemented at every level in the OSI model.

Some of the countermeasure to overcome potential denial of service attacks involves many steps, including mitigation processes, policies to recognise potential threats as well as setting up the right infrastructures. For instance, companies should implement redundancy in their IT infrastructures. Replicating servers across multiple data centres ensures minimal chances of launching any successful denial of service attack. Respective companies should make load balancing systems to distribute traffic between the servers. Besides, data centres should be in different regions or even different countries. Therefore, to increase the success rates of this kind of solution, it is recommended that organisations should set up various networks to connect those data centres. Respective organisations should eliminate any potential network bottlenecks, including a single point of failure on the data centre networks. By having data centres distributed on different topographical and geographical locations, service continuity is guaranteed even when one server is attacked.

Another solution at the hardware level involves protecting the company's DNS servers. There is a probability if the DNS is not well protected, it can be used to bring down the web servers. Therefore, ensuring the company's DNS server is highly secured becomes the starting point to reduce the chances of denial of service attack. Ensure that DNS servers are placed in different data centres as well as having redundancy. Large enterprise possibly should opt for a cloud-based DNS solution since cloud providers promise higher bandwidth as well as multiple points of presence across different data centres in the world. Besides, the cloud DNS has been designed with denial of service in mind.

Additionally, the IT network infrastructures should be configured against DoS attacks. For instance, the network firewall, including routers, should be set to block ping requests by merely dropping any incoming ICMP packets. Besides, any DNS response coming from an outside network should be prevented by blocking the UDP port 53 (Stoneburner, Goguen, and Feringa, 2002). All these configurations will ensure the company network is safe from any DNS or ping-based volumetric attacks. Also, an organisation should implement both network firewall applications, and web application firewalls to protect its servers. For instance, the majority of hardware vendors are including software protection against distributed denial of service attacks. Organisations should prioritise security when purchasing any networking device by ensuring they are well protected and have security software included where possible.

Besides, the majority of network security vendors such as Fortinet, Cisco, NetScout, Checkpoint, and Radware offer DDoS protection appliances that are placed in front of a regular network firewall. These appliances are designed to block any denial of service attempts before they become effective. Denial of Service protection appliances implements several techniques, including traffic behavioural baselining, to prevent any abnormal network traffic. Also, these appliances use already known attack signatures to block any suspicious traffic. However, the traffic amounts that these appliances can handle are limited and, therefore, not highly reliable, although they can help minimise the risk involved.

Additionally, if respective organisations can afford to scale up their network bandwidth, the better, for instance, most volumetric attacks can be minimised by just increasing the available bandwidth to handle large volumes of network traffic where necessary (Stoneburner, Goguen, and Feringa, 2002). However, this might seem a better solution for the large enterprises that are most likely to afford large bandwidth as compared to smaller businesses. Besides, small businesses should adopt outsourcing as an option to acquire specialised infrastructure in efforts to mitigate DOS attacks.

Several large security companies have specialised in outsourcing DOS mitigation services that guarantee a scalable network that can respond to the denial of service attacks. The majority of these providers have implemented cloud scrubbing services for attack traffic and then remove most of the potential malicious traffic before hitting the target victim's network. Also, smaller businesses should consider ISP providers who can offer mitigation services for the denial of service attacks. For instance, the suspicious traffic is rerouted to the mitigation centre by the ISP for scrubbing, and then only legitimate traffic is forwarded to the respective company. Mitigation centres should make use of scalable as well as dynamic load balancing capability for responding to unprecedented traffic levels that can potentially result from a denial of service attack.

Measures that companies should implement to minimise the occurrence of DoS attacks include; developing a DoS Response Plan, Maintaining Strong network architectures, leveraging the cloud, understanding the warning signs, and considering DDoS as a service. Organisations should perform a security assessment and use it to develop a denial of the service prevention plan. However, the majority of the larger enterprises, unlike small businesses, might require a more complex network infrastructure involving multiple teams in the planning. Besides, once attacked, the organisation never have all the time to consider or evaluate all the best steps to undertake. Therefore, every organisation should clearly define the necessary measures in advance, ensuring prompt actions are taken while avoiding the associated impacts. Also, companies should ensure that their data centres are prepared, and the respective team is aware of their individual responsibilities (Stoneburner, Goguen, and Feringa, 2002). The response plan should include a systems checklist, forming a response team, defining notifications as well as escalation procedures, and finally, include both external and internal contact lists.

Besides, the organisation should vet its web hosting providers before deploying its websites. For instance, a shared server exposes your sites to attack from other websites on that same server. Therefore, organisations should understand the procedure implemented by the provider in case of an attack. For example, you need to know whether the provider will shut down any attacked website just to spare its other customers. However, companies can take advantage of dedicated or distributed server deployment models for their websites. This approach will help minimise any downtime in case of an attack on a shared server. Besides, organisations can ask for protection against denial of service attacks from their service provider.

Additionally, companies can perform DoS mitigation procedures at the hardware level by ensuring the right configurations on the security devices. For instance, companies should opt for security solutions such as Stateful inspection firewalls, and stateful SYN Proxy mechanism. Besides, a limit should be set on the number of SYNs per second per IP address, as well as configuring ICMP flood screen on the firewall, setting up UDP flood screen, and finally, rating limit network routers that should be placed adjacent to the firewall and network (Stoneburner, Goguen, and Feringa, 2002).

Businesses should implement policies that ensure every information and data being stored or transmitted over the internet is well executed. Encryption ensures that sensitive data is converted into a secret code. Besides, every incoming, as well as outgoing, should be well encrypted. The source MAC addressed should be authenticated to ensure that not every machine can send traffic to the organisational network.

However, organisations should just be prepared for denial of service attacks. Today these kinds of attacks are not only a reserve for the more significant corporation, but even small and medium-size businesses are being targeted. Small companies need training on the most common DoS attacks as well as the best security strategies to stay safe. Besides, companies should develop a detailed business continuity plan to ensure services are restored as fast as possible in case of a successful attack. Also, companies should invest and set up email servers dedicated to only email services (Stoneburner, Goguen, and Feringa, 2002). Companies can keep a record of all the well-known denial of service hubs from different countries.

Today, cybersecurity has become a business problem and not just an IT issue. Therefore, organisations can not only pass cybersecurity issues to the IT department but instead should be addressed just like any other business issue. This fact poses a more significant concern, especially with the more digitised businesses since they are more exposed to cybersecurity threats. Companies, both small and medium, should shift this old mind-set and get prepared to handle the threats and develop a response plan as a business risk (Stoneburner, Goguen, and Feringa, 2002). Therefore, businesses should integrate cyber protection into every aspect of the business right from employee training to the IT department to implementing security policies. For instance, organisations should design a security framework covering all the critical areas, including policy and standards, business context, security controls, as well as the environment. As denial of service attacks increasingly become a business challenge and not entirely a technical issue, most of the prevention solutions available are to ensure organisational resilience as well as planning for resilient infrastructure designs, including the steps for dispersing how resources.

Businesses should consider inputs from every aspect, including their customers. Besides, this consideration guarantees more robust and effective preventive strategies against cyber-attacks as well as mitigation plans such as faster service restoration in case the inevitable happens (Stoneburner, Goguen, and Feringa, 2002). Besides, companies should consider investing in data recovery tools of data that gets deleted during a cyber-attack incident. Also, companies, both small and medium, should ensure their security infrastructures, as well as policies, are up to date. They should be updated after some time to ensure they match with current technologies. Besides, the more technology advances, the higher the threats and risks of cyber-attacks.

Besides, businesses should take adequate measures to ensure all of the employees are sensitised and educated on how to stay safe. For instance, an employee should not open every email they encounter on their inbox, not opening unknown web URLs. The majority of the attackers target these vulnerable employees who click almost every URL they find on their emails. Apart from the training, organisations should implement email filters to filter out any suspicious e...