DDoS Prevention and Mitigation
MySpace got hit by a DDoS attack… more than 8 users were disconnected.
::Together With Financial Cents::
How accounting firms get work done.
What the what is DDoS!? And why you should care.
Buckle up, folks - this will be a dry article, but I want you to be armed with the knowledge you can ask your app partners about or check their security whitepapers on.
One of my apps recently had a DDoS attack that shut it down for a few hours, so I checked in with a few others to see what they had in play to deal with this issue. Abdullah Almsaeed, Co-Founder and CTO at Financial Cents, helped me out with this article. I asked Abdullah, as we have talked about security on more than a few occasions, and he takes it very seriously for their product.
Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS) happens when nefarious characters send many requests to a web server, overloading it and making it non-responsive. This prevents legitimate users from accessing the web application and increases error rates.
A DDoS attack is like an unexpected traffic jam clogging up the digital highway, preventing regular traffic from arriving at its destination.
You should care about DDoS prevention protocols because a DDoS attack can cause our cloud-based apps to go down. And that is mightily inconvenient, no?
DDoS can be difficult to mitigate because an attacker can utilize a large number of computers distributed across the world to initiate the attack. This makes distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate users impossible since the malicious requests won’t look any different from normal traffic.
One solution to this is to implement a highly scalable infrastructure (rent a large number of servers) that can handle the spike in traffic coming into the site. However, this becomes a game of who has more money between the attacker and the defender, making it an ineffective solution.
The good news is that most DDoS attacks are done using bots. Bots are not smart enough to solve certain computational challenges, such as presenting it with a set of pictures of bridges and roads and asking it to pick only bridge pictures. This type of challenge is easy for a human to complete but hard for a bot (to be fair, they are not actually easy for this little human to complete - sigh…). By presenting this type of challenge to incoming users, programs can start distinguishing which users are bots vs humans and block any traffic that can’t solve the challenge.
The problem with the computational challenge approach is that applications still need the infrastructure to handle presenting the challenge to the bots, which could be costly and difficult to maintain.
“That’s why Financial Cents partnered with CloudFlare, a leading network and cybersecurity provider, to protect our users from many types of cyber attacks. CloudFlare provides and maintains the infrastructure we need to be prepared for such attacks. In the event of a DDoS attack, CloudFlare can automatically identify and block traffic before it even reaches our servers, in addition to verifying human users vs bots by presenting a computational challenge. This happens on CloudFlare’s vast infrastructure, allowing our servers to remain available and accept legitimate traffic without downtime.
To be even more prepared, Financial Cents periodically tests our cyber defence techniques by running penetration tests (controlled attacks) on exact replicas of our infrastructure. Doing this allows us to identify and resolve potential issues in a controlled environment. Running penetration tests multiple times yearly is crucial to keep up with all the new and evolving threats to web applications.”
I mentioned to Abdullah that I didn’t recall being asked to do the image challenge.
“The image matching challenge is only triggered if your IP was previously blacklisted by us or if it gets activated due to a sudden spike in traffic.“
Side note: we do have a system running behind the scenes that monitors your mouse movements to identify that you are human. Bots don’t use mice 😅 If you behave more like a bot, you’ll get presented with the challenge.”
Of course, I then got a little creeped out. FC can track my mouse movements?
“The mouse movement tracking only happens on the authentication pages before accessing the actual app. The movements are not stored anywhere on our servers. Once they’re analyzed to check against bots, they’re discarded.”
Whew!
This was an interesting aspect of distinguishing bots from humans that I had not heard of; that you can be alerted whether a bot is trying to get into an app by the “mouse movements”. It’s fascinating how ingenious hackers and security experts can be, no?
I warned you this may not be an exciting read, but every little bit of knowledge I can pass onto you about cloud security readies you to ensure your apps are looking out for you and your clients.
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I am taking a little breather from events until the spring, except for two fun, small-group masterminds in Jason Staat’s Realize Community. We will be working a Firm Evaluation Form and setting up actionable steps to start building your dream firm.
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