Defend Against DDoS Attacks: 5 Effective Ways to Protect Your Services

DDoS attacks are one of the most powerful tools cybercriminals use to cause significant financial, operational, and reputational damage to companies. While attack methods vary, the goal is always the same: to overwhelm target servers, services, or networks with traffic from hijacked devices or networks.

Effective DDoS protection requires a comprehensive approach that addresses threats at all levels. The best solutions combine performance with scalable, cloud-based defense at the network edge. This ensures flexibility and almost unlimited capacity to withstand even the largest and most complex DDoS attacks.

New Attack Trends Increase DDoS Security Challenges

A successful DDoS attack immediately degrades service performance, and in the worst case, makes the service completely unusable. Poor performance on web applications leads to higher bounce rates, lower conversions, and damage to brand reputation. In corporate networks, employees may be unable to complete their daily tasks.

Additionally, some DDoS attacks serve as distractions for other types of attacks, keeping security teams occupied while attackers target their real objectives through other means.

Emerging trends, such as the rise in volumetric attacks and the increasing prevalence of ransom-based DDoS attacks, compound DDoS security challenges. Businesses must distinguish between attack traffic and legitimate traffic, block harmful bots without disrupting legitimate users, and continually analyze traffic patterns to improve defenses.

Here, we present five powerful ways to counter DDoS attacks.

1. Strengthen Your Defense Mechanisms

Since DDoS attacks can target multiple layers of the OSI model, it's essential to adopt a comprehensive defense strategy. The following tactics can complement traditional DDoS solutions and offer additional protection for servers and networks:

• Protect servers with a reverse proxy: To safeguard web servers, a reverse proxy prevents attackers from identifying server IP addresses, directing attacks only to the proxy and shielding the actual servers.

• One of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to leverage a reverse proxy is by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which reduces latency by caching content closer to end users.

2. Prioritize Defense Capacity and Mitigation Speed

The key metrics for DDoS protection are defense capacity and how quickly the solution can neutralize attacks (mitigation speed).

Traditionally, companies manage DDoS-induced traffic spikes by investing in hardware, but this approach requires paying for capacity that's only used occasionally. Even the most robust enterprise infrastructures can struggle to handle the largest volumetric attacks.

Rate limiting, or controlling the number of requests a server accepts within a given time frame, helps mitigate traffic spikes but doesn’t stop the most sophisticated attacks and can slow performance during legitimate traffic surges. Therefore, scalable cloud-based DDoS protection solutions with vast capacity are essential to absorb even the largest attacks without leaving organizations vulnerable.

Since even a few minutes of degraded service availability can result in significant financial losses and productivity declines, time to mitigate (TTM) is another critical factor. Cloud-based, edge-network DDoS protection reduces mitigation times by stopping attacks near their source without overloading the infrastructure.

3. Compare Always-On Protection and On-Demand Solutions

On-demand DDoS protection services operate when traffic flows normally until thresholds are breached, at which point potential DDoS attacks are detected and protection is manually activated. This approach extends mitigation time.

On-demand solutions are less ideal for short-duration attacks, which Cloudflare reports constitute the majority of DDoS attacks. For example, in Q3 2021, over 94% of network-layer attacks lasted less than an hour. Short attacks may also test an organization’s defenses ahead of a larger assault.

Always-on protection is continuous. All website traffic is consistently filtered, allowing only clean traffic to reach the client’s servers. Mitigation time is shortened since there's no need to manually activate protection when an attack begins.

4. Don’t Sacrifice Performance for Security – Have Both

Today’s users expect websites and applications to always be available and load quickly. With every delayed second reducing conversion rates by up to 4.42%, DDoS protection must not compromise performance.

Many organizations filter traffic through scrubbing centers, but these are often far from the traffic’s origin or target network, causing bottlenecks that force businesses to choose between performance and security.

Edge-based cloud mitigation services solve this problem. Instead of filtering through centralized data centers, attacks are mitigated on every contact point in a distributed network. This allows attacks to be detected and stopped closer to their source, reducing mitigation time and improving performance.

5. Utilize Threat Intelligence to Stay Ahead of Attackers

As DDoS attacks evolve, defending against them requires continuous traffic analysis. Recognizing malicious patterns allows you to develop smart, adaptive defense mechanisms.

Cloud-based DDoS mitigation systems often use machine learning to detect and block new, emerging threats. When selecting solutions, focus on network intelligence—the larger and more advanced the mitigation network, the more insights it provides on new attack patterns, enabling more proactive protection.

Cloudflare DDoS Mitigation with HiQ

HiQ partners with Cloudflare, one of the world’s leading DDoS mitigators. In addition to DDoS protection, Cloudflare safeguards against ransomware, identity theft, and application vulnerabilities.

Cloudflare’s layered security model combines a variety of DDoS mitigation capabilities into one service, blocking malicious traffic and ensuring that clean traffic reaches its destination. This keeps websites, applications, APIs, and entire networks running without compromising availability or performance.

• Fast, automated mitigation: Unlike traditional scrubbing center solutions, Cloudflare hosts security services on every network server, regardless of attack size or complexity.

• Comprehensive protection: Cloudflare detects and mitigates attacks across Layers 3, 4, and 7 at the network edge before they affect systems.

• Global threat intelligence: Cloudflare’s DDoS protection leverages the intelligence of a global network, safeguarding millions of internet properties and enabling the identification of abnormal traffic to protect against complex and evolving attacks.

• Ease of use and management: The always-on, cloud-based DDoS protection is built on an intuitive interface, allowing users to protect against attacks with just a few clicks.

• Cost-effectiveness: Cloudflare offers unlimited, unmetered DDoS protection across all plans, regardless of attack size, with no extra costs or surcharges for traffic spikes.

  HiQ is Cloudflare’s partner in Finland. Want to learn more? Get in touch!