Validating DDoS Threat Protection

This white paper is for security and networking professionals who are looking to protect their networks against the devastating effects of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

In this paper, you will learn more about the various types of DDoS attacks, the challenges that are involved with detecting and mitigating these attacks, and the importance of validating any threat protection solution for realworld performance.

A Denial of Service or DoS attack is a tool an attacker uses to render an online service inaccessible to legitimate users. DDoS attack tools come in many shapes and sizes, all focused on overwhelming a part of the infrastructure that delivers the service. For example, a web server that hosts a service can be overwhelmed with an excess of fake requests, so that legitimate requests are not able to be met. Often, these attacks come from many compromised hosts on the Internet, which are all remotely controlled by an attacker.

These compromised hosts, known as bots and distributed over the Internet, are enlisted in a botnet. This means that the attack is launched from many different hosts simultaneously; this is known as a Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attack. Attack traffic accumulates to larger and larger traffic rates, all destined for the victim’s IP address.