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Avoiding Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and DDoS Distributed Attacks   no comments

Posted at Aug 14, 2012 @ 9:16am Web hosting

I wanted to talk you about a common concern and questions I constantly receive on our sales chat. DDOS’s or Distributed Denial of Service Attacks. Everyone from resellers, to cpanel basic hosting, to dedicated servers all the way down to virtual private servers or VPS’s.

 

All users are looking for a host that can provide them some protection against these DDOS attacks. Now, before we can provide protection from these attacks, it’s probably best that I educated you on what exactly a DDOS attack actually is. Let’s go to our good friend Wikipedia and see the definition they supply:

 

In  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the efforts of one or more people to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend services of a  host connected to the Internet.

 

Now how perpetrators do this specific attack varies greatly. We will go back to our great friend of Wikipedia to get a few different ways that people attempt to take down your web site or cloud sourced server:

A DoS attack can be perpetrated in a number of ways. The five basic types of attack are listed as :

1.      Consumption of computational resources, such as bandwidth, disk space, or   processor time.

 

2.      Disruption of configuration information, such as routing information.

 

3.      Disruption of state information, such as unsolicited resetting of TCP sessions.

 

4.      Disruption of physical network components.

 

5.      Obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

 

I like to think of a DDOS like this:

.         Hacker/Cracker/Perpetrator decides another website needs to go for some reason

.         Hacker/Cracker/Perpetrator selects his favorite method of doing so.

.         Hacker/Cracker/Perpetrator commences attack such as 1 billion ping requests to server

.         web sites are beginning to slow down or appear offline

 

 

From the web hosting side of things – the provider will often see

.         Load spikes on server

.         Bandwidth graphs spike

.         Customers open ticket on how they’re sites are down or going slower than usual

This process can repeat unless the hosting company takes preventative measures. This brings us full circle back to the original issue customers usually ask when signing up for Turnkey Internets services: Do you have protection against DDOS attacks.  This is a common question today – as DDOS is a common issue facing everyone (even if you aren’t the victim of an attack, chances are your web site or corporate server is on a network, or datacenter that had someone being attacked!) needs to be aware of.

The answer to this, an emphatic YES from TurnKey.  But you need to make sure any host company you work with can answer this, and in detail.   You see, many host companies lack the scale, size and control to secure both the web site, server, and network to provide a true DDOS solution.  At TurnKey we have protection built into our web hosting services such as CloudLinux which will throttle an account when it’s using too many resources, – as well as application level (web based evasive protocols to weed out attackers traffic from good traffic), and we also have protection on our network layer, firewalls – and all the way up to our edge network to blackhole attacks from ever reaching your server, or web site.

You see, there are many types of DDOS attacks, such as a bot sending waves of traffic to another host(bandwidth flooding), or connection flooding (opening too many port requests to the web daemon at once to a specific ip address), and many other sophisticated methods.  Most hosting companies can address the application and server level, but rely on a middle man (their datacenter) to then get involved to help block the big attacks at the network level.

This is where our the design  of Turnkey’s network comes into play. The design of the Turnkey network allows us engineers, to block the attack before it enters the core where the attack is designed to go. Since we have different cores, we can block the attack before it enters the core, which essentially blocks the attack on the switch the server is connected to.  This gives you the best possible protection – compared to say your average hosting company who has to call up their datacenter or upstream carrier, ask for help, and wait for them to manually help them.

This is one of the glorious perks of working at Turnkey Internet. We will have a problem and come up with creative solutions to common problems every hosts face.  While DDOS attacks continue to evolve, and grow – the one thing that remains constant that good security minded staff at your hosting company are a must have!

Until next time Turnkey Lovers.

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Written by Jeremy on August 14th, 2012

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