DDoS Protection: Defending Against Denial of Service Attacks
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack attempts to overwhelm a system with traffic, making it unavailable to legitimate users. Understanding how they work and how we defend against them helps you understand your resilience posture.
Types of DDoS Attacks
- Volumetric attacks: Flood your network with enormous traffic volumes, exhausting bandwidth. Measured in Gbps — largest attacks have exceeded 1 Tbps.
- Protocol attacks: Exploit weaknesses in network protocols (SYN floods, Ping of Death) to exhaust server resources
- Application layer attacks (Layer 7): Send seemingly legitimate requests that consume disproportionate server resources (HTTP floods targeting expensive endpoints)
Our DDoS Mitigation Approach
- CDN and anycast routing: Services like Cloudflare distribute traffic across a global network, absorbing volumetric attacks before they reach your infrastructure
- Rate limiting: IP-based and user-based rate limits that throttle abnormal request volumes
- Auto-scaling: Cloud infrastructure that scales to handle legitimate traffic spikes — reducing the impact of moderate attacks
- WAF rules: Block known attack patterns at the edge
- IP reputation lists: Block known malicious IP ranges
What DDoS Protection Cannot Guarantee
Sufficiently large, sophisticated DDoS attacks can disrupt even well-protected services. Our goal is to make your system resilient to realistic attack volumes — while maintaining monitoring and rapid response capability for larger events.