5 steps to prepare for a DDoS Attack in prior

Step 1: Map Vulnerable Assets

The ancient Greeks said that knowing thyself is that the beginning of wisdom.It is no surprise, therefore, that the primary step to securing your assets against a DDoS attack is to understand what assets there are to be secured.

Begin by listing all external-facing assets which may potentially be attacked. This list should be inclusive of both physical and virtual assets:

Physical locations & offices

Data centers

Servers

Applications

IP addresses and subnets

Domains, sub-domains and specific FQDN’s

Mapping out all externally-facing assets will assist you draw your threat surface and identify your point of vulnerability.

Step 2: Assess Potential Damages

After listing all potentially vulnerable assets, find out what proportion they're worth to you.

This is a key question, because the answer will help determine what proportion you ought to spend in protecting these properties.

Keep in mind that some damages are direct, while other could also be indirect. Some of the potential damages from a DDoS attack are inclusive of:

Direct loss of revenue – If your website or application is generating revenue directly on a daily basis, then any loss of availability will cause direct, immediate losses in revenue. For example, if your website generates $1m every day, every hour of downtime, on the typical, will cause over $40,000 in damages.

Loss in productivity – For organizations that believe online services, like email, scheduling, storage, CRM or databases, any loss of availability to any of those services will directly result in loss of productivity and lost workdays.

SLA obligations – For applications and services that are bound by service commitments, any downtime can cause breach of SLA, leading to refunding customers for lost services, granting service credits, and even potentially facing lawsuits.

Damage to brand – during a world that's becoming ever-more connected, being available is increasingly tied to a company’s brand and identity. Any loss of availability as a result of a cyber-attack, therefore, can directly impact a company’s brand and its goodwill. In fact, Radware’s 2018 Application and Network Security Report showed that 43% of companies had experienced reputation loss as a result of a cyber-attack.

Loss of consumers – one among the most important potential damages of a successful DDoS attack is loss of consumers. This can be either a direct loss or indirect loss (i.e., potential customers who are unable to succeed in you and lost business opportunities). Either of which, this is often a key concern.

Step 3: Assign Responsibility

Once you create a listing of probably vulnerable assets, then assign a dollar-figure (or the other currency…) to what proportion they're worth for you, subsequent step is to decide who is liable for protecting them.

Step 4: Set Up Detection Mechanisms

Now that you’ve evaluated which assets you want to protect and who’s liable for protecting them, subsequent step is to line up measures which will provide you with a warning to once you come under attack.

After all, you don’t want your customers – or worse, your boss – to be those to inform you that your services and applications are offline.

Detection measures are often deployed either at the network level or at the appliance level.

Make sure these measures are configured in order that they don’t just detect attacks, but also provide you with a warning when something bad happens.

Step 5: Deploy a DDoS Protection Solution

Finally, after the assessment of the vulnerabilities, costs, and found out attack detection mechanisms, now's the time to deploy actual protection.

This step is best done before you get attacked, and not once you are already under one.

DDoS protection isn't a one-size-fits-all proposition, and there are many sorts of protection options, counting on the characteristics, risk and value of every individual asset.

On-demand cloud mitigation services are activated just one occasion an attack is detected. They require rock bottom overhead and are rock bottom cost solution, but require traffic diversion for cover to kick-in. As a result, they're best fitted to cost-sensitive customers, services which aren't mission-critical, and customers who haven't been (or are infrequently) attacked, but need a basic form of backup.

Ultimately, you can’t control if-and-when you're attacked, but following these steps will assist you be prepared when DDoS attackers come knocking at your door.