Application layer DDoS protection is an emerging solution to protect organizations from application-layer DDoS attacks. These attacks are becoming more and more common, as they are often low cost to launch and difficult to detect. Defense against these types of attacks requires a different approach than traditional DDoS protection, because this type of attack has the potential to cripple core services like email, web pages, and authentication. Application layer DDoS protection means that the key functions of an application are protected before they reach the network. In order to do this, you need a firewall that can detect and block inbound connections from sources before they reach applications.
Application DDoS are complicated and hard to prevent, but we have a range of techniques that can help protect you. Unlike network layer attacks, where most types of attack are about manipulation of protocol, in application DDOS the most prominent type of attack is volumetric. Volumetric attacks have no common method and it’s harder to identify them before they happen. Hackers create this legitimate-seeming requests at high volume in order to get the application’s resources. In doing so, they clog up other people’s requests and prevent them from being granted access to the application.
The most common technique to detect application DDOS is rate limiting. You set limits on number of requests a user can make. The two fundamental principles for defending against volumetric DDoS attacks are:
- Ability to detect incoming requests, the initial defence against a volumetric attack is to respond as early as possible and scale up as demand increases.
- Identify and block suspicious requests quickly, so only authorized logins can access your account. These usually create large spikes in traffic and are detected and blocked by our system.
To protect against both DDoS and other types of security breach, it may be best to invest in cloud protection (like AppTrana) that offers DDOS protection capabilities. A cloud WAF can also quickly scale up to accommodate temporary or unusual spikes in volume. We use a unique grey-box rule engine which allows us to detect and block large, sophisticated attacks in the face of 2.3 Tbps and up to 700K requests per second.
In order to protect the backend from being overloaded by potentially malicious requests, it’s important to have a strong web application firewall strategy. These tools can be configured to detect and filter out unwanted requests, which will free up your resources so you can serve legitimate requests.
Get URI-Based DDoS Protection for your Applications
Static rate limits are not enough. With the vast majority of DDoS attacks able to go undetected, it’s important that your business is protected by a solution that will actively hunt potential security threats. By continually monitoring and mitigating these risks as they arise, you can feel assured that your business is completely safe from these attacks.
- Rate limits can only be set on certain identities. For instance, it cannot be set to only allow a certain number of requests in a specific period of time, but it can block them after they exceed x – this will protect both more experienced and less experienced users.
Website load times depend on a lot of factors, but it’s easy to allow your site to automatically adapt depending on the time of day. One of our sites gets a huge amount for hits at the end of each month due to the fact that it gets managed by an AI writing assistant. The number of individual requests usually increases more than three times during this period. If you need to restrict the rate, variations should be built into the workload on a day-to-day basis. Every month, spikes like these seem to emerge near the end of the month but will still pass undetected. If your application servers are close to its capacity limit, the spike will push it over that limit and this may lead to disruptions of service.API Data Protection Solution tackles these and many other challenges. If you are interested in it, please contact us and we will be happy to help.
The AppTrana Behavioural Application DDOS Protection takes advantage of its ability to process huge volumes of requests instantly, and provides policies that are configured based on the behaviour of the application’s requests.
- DDOS attacks can be set up to trigger when the behaviour of requests changes, so any normal deviation from expected behaviour is caught and alerts are only triggered if something unusual happens.
- By default, three policies that can track both the host of a connection, their IP address and the duration of their session are active.
- It is common to have generic, default policies when an application is onboarded. They are configured with values that work for the majority of applications
- Based on your usage of the application, we’ll be able to determine what you value most and tailor the service to suit these preferences.
- Customers can configure any sort of policy they would like based on their need. Policies can be configured to take various actions when triggered and this includes blocking the request outright.
