How to Prevent a DDoS Attack

What is a DDoS Attack?

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a common type of cyber attack where a malicious actor floods a web server, service, or network with traffic to disrupt its normal operations.

Read more: What is a DDoS Attack?

A DDoS attack uses a botnet—a network of compromised devices infected with malware to flood a target’s IP address with excessive requests. This surge overwhelms server resources and disrupts normal operations. Because each bot appears as a legitimate device, its traffic patterns mimic legitimate users, making malicious activity difficult to detect and block.

Read more: How Do DDoS Attacks Work?

DDoS attacks vary based on the attack vectors used and their deployment methods. Common types of DDoS attacks include:

1. Volumetric DDoS attacks are the most common type of distributed-denial-of-service attack, overwhelming a server’s bandwidth with massive amounts of false data requests. While the machine is busy processing malicious requests, legitimate traffic is not able to pass through.

2. Protocol DDoS attacks exhaust server resources by targeting the network infrastructure responsible for verifying connections. They use tactics such as slow pings, malformed pings, and partial packet requests to disrupt operations.

3. Application-layer (Layer 7) DDoS attacks strike at the topmost layer in the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, focusing on web-facing services. These attacks often exploit protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, or SMTP to disrupt applications while consuming minimal bandwidth.

Why is DDoS Prevention Important?

As organizations grow increasingly dependent on their online presence and digital services, their exposure to cyber threats has risen sharply, especially DDoS attacks. In this environment, DDoS prevention is more crucial now than ever for organizations to stay connected and maintain business continuity. Robust protection not only minimizes costly downtime but also safeguards revenue, supports compliance with data regulations, and improves resilience against DDoS attacks.

9 Ways to Prevent DDoS Attacks

Automation technology can partially help with DDoS attack prevention, but it also requires human intelligence and continuous monitoring. Traditional web structures aren’t sufficient. The most effective defense is a multi-layered cloud security developed and monitored by experienced engineers.

Understanding how DDoS attacks operate and tracking your network’s normal traffic patterns are essential to detecting anomalies and preventing intrusions, outages, and downtime.

1. Implement sound network monitoring practices

The first step in mitigating DDoS threats is to recognize when you are about to be hit. This means implementing technology that allows you to monitor your incoming traffic visually and in real-time. Know the amount of bandwidth your site uses on average so that you can track anomalies quickly.

DDoS attacks often offer visual clues. The more familiar you are with your network’s normal behavior, the faster you can recognize and respond to potential threats in real time.

2. Practice basic security hygiene

Every business can take simple steps to maintain a baseline level of security against DDoS threats. Best practices include using complex passwords, requiring password resets every few months, and avoiding the storage or writing down of passwords in notes. These steps might sound trivial, but many online services suffer breaches because organizations neglect basic security hygiene.

3. Set up basic traffic thresholds

You can partially mitigate attacks with other technical security measures. These include setting traffic thresholds and limits, such as rate limiting on your router and filters on incoming traffic from suspicious sources. Lowering SYN, ICMP, and UDP flood drop thresholds, applying IP blacklisting, enabling geo-blocking, and using signature-based identification are other first-line defenses. Such may delay an attack, but evolving DDoS techniques demand more advanced defenses to completely mitigate the risk.

4. Keep your security infrastructure up to date

Your network is as strong as your weakest link. Outdated or legacy systems often become vulnerable entry points when exploited, so staying aware of them is critical.

Keep your data center and systems updated, and regularly patch your web application firewalls along with other network security programs. Additionally, working with your ISP, hosting provider, or data center vendor to implement advanced protection capabilities can further strengthen your defenses against potential threats.

5. Be ready with a DDoS response battle plan

Once a DDoS attack begins, it will be too late to decide how to react. You need to have a response plan prepared in advance to minimize the impact. An effective response plan should include:

• Checklist of tools: List of all the tools to be implemented, including advanced threat detection, traffic assessment, filtering, and relevant software and hardware.

• Response team: Assign personnel with clearly defined roles and responsibilities for action once they detect an attack.Escalation protocols: Clear guidelines on whom to notify, escalate to, and involve in the event of an attack.

• Escalation protocols: Clear guidelines on whom to notify, escalate to, and involve in the event of an attack.

• Communication plan: A strategy for notifying internal and external stakeholders, including your ISP, vendors, and customers, and providing real-time updates.

6. Ensure sufficient server capacity

Volumetric DDoS attacks work by overwhelming the network bandwidth by flooding it with excessive traffic. One effective mitigation strategy is to overprovision your bandwidth, equipping your server with enough capacity to handle heavy traffic spikes. While this approach alone won’t stop a DDoS attack target completely, it can provide valuable extra time to detect the attack and activate additional defenses before your resources are exhausted.

7. Explore cloud-based DDoS protection solutions

Integrating cloud-based DDoS protection into your mitigation strategy brings significant advantages. Cloud providers have access to more bandwidth and resources compared to private networks, enabling them to absorb large volumes of malicious traffic. Their distributed data centers can identify and filter out attack traffic before it reaches your infrastructure, effectively dispersing threats across a distributed infrastructure and reducing the risk of downtime.

8. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A modern and effective way for mitigating DDoS attacks is to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Since DDoS attacks work by overloading a hosting server, a CDN can help by distributing incoming requests across a network of geographically dispersed servers. This load balancing not only reduces the risk of any single server being overwhelmed but also improves content delivery speed by directing users to the nearest server. Additionally, many CDNs offer certificate management, including automatic certificate generation and renewal, further strengthening website security and reliability.

9. Embrace AI-powered cybersecurity

Cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with attackers now leveraging AI-driven automation tools to launch both targeted and large-scale campaigns at unprecedented speed. Traditional static defenses based on fixed rules often fail to keep up with evolving attack methods, which leads to high false positives and delayed responses.

By integrating AI-powered security into your defense strategy, you can detect anomalies in real time, initiate automated mitigation, and continuously refine protection without manual intervention.

The system deploys mitigation policies within seconds of detecting threats, minimizing disruption and reducing false alerts. Through continuous learning and automation, an AI-powered security framework provides faster threat detection, precise and proactive defense against emerging threats, and enables organizations to build a more resilient security posture.

How CDNetworks Can Help?

CDNetworks offers a comprehensive, cloud-based DDoS mitigation service through its Flood Shield 2.0. By combining AI-powered threat detection, automated mitigation, and an expansive global network, it ensures seamless and robust protection against a wide range of DDoS attacks while maintaining service availability and performance.

Some of the key benefits of our layered threat protection include:

• Massive Global Infrastructure
  With over 40 global DDoS scrubbing centers and a total capacity of 20 Tbps, Flood Shield 2.0 protects businesses against sophisticated and large-scale volumetric attacks, ensuring uninterrupted operations. Our proven capabilities have been demonstrated in defending a browser game platform against a massive 1.24 Tbps DDoS attack without service disruption.

• Comprehensive Protection Powered by AI
  Our advanced AI engine combines machine learning and real-time behavioral baselines to detect and mitigate all spectrum of DDoS threats—from large-scale layer 3/4 volumetric and protocol DDoS attacks, layer 7 application-layer attacks, to unknown and emerging DDoS attacks with minimal human intervention.

• Integrated DDoS Protection & Acceleration
  Flood Shield 2.0 leverages CDNetworks’ globally distributed CDN infrastructure and high-capacity cross-border links to maintain fast, reliable access under attack. By absorbing and mitigating malicious traffic at strategically located PoPs worldwide, the attack load is dispersed before it can overwhelm any single location.

• One-stop WAAP Integration
  Beyond advanced DDoS protection, Flood Shield 2.0 seamlessly unites Web Application Firewall (WAF), Bot management, and API security into one integrated platform, enabling organizations to implement a comprehensive WAAP strategy. This cohesive approach strengthens defenses across multiple threat vectors, enhancing overall website and application security.

• 24/7/365 Global Support
  CDNetworks provides round-the-clock expert support through local teams worldwide, ensuring timely assistance that keeps customers protected and connected anytime, anywhere.