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Ask HN: How to cope with DDoS attacks today?
As a system administrator, it always been a nightmare scenario for me. I was wondering what to do if attacker was powerful enough to have wide range of IPs and random timing. Is it possible to detect such attacks? Are there any good resources to study prevention techniques? Thank you all.
- jgrahamc 8y agoIf they've got more bandwidth than your connection you're going to need to go upstream to the network provider and work with them. Alternately, find a hosting provider that includes DDoS protection, or use something like Cloudflare in front of your site/API. Resources for learning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17063924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17063924
- astrodust 8y agoOVH includes DDOS protection for a lot of their services and it works quite well. They've had to weather a lot of huge attacks because their service is popular with Minecraft server hosting companies, and apparently that industry is rife with DDOS sabotage of competitors.
- antizionist 8y agoUse Akamai or Cloudflare
- blakesterz 8y agoThere was another question on this recently that was interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17061281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17061281
- leowoo91 8y agoOh, I didn't see that but looks like a great thread already! Many thanks!
- chomp 8y agoIf you have a fat enough pipe, get a Peakflow-like device. They can usually support a few terabit of traffic (depending on if you're doing simple white/blacklists, or layer 7 mitigation). Might not work against the IoT bots or a sufficiently sophisticated attack as we all saw with the Dyn DDoS, but if you have a good peering agreement they should allow you to announce /32 (IPv4) nullroutes over BGP, which will take care of anything that saturates your uplink, and you can scrub the rest. If you don't have your own datacenter space, your options are limited. You can use Cloudflare, or serve your content over CDN.
- leowoo91 8y agoKudos for anything could be purchased but beyond layer7 looks harder, I understand.
- chomp 8y agoWe use these (not affiliated other than just being a customer): https://www.netscout.com/product/arbor-threat-mitigation-system https://www.netscout.com/product/arbor-threat-mitigation-sys... But any DDoS mitigation appliance should be similar. Layer 7 is difficult because it's expensive to do on a scrubbing device, but also because a sufficiently sophisticated DDoS can look like normal traffic. Cloudflare can stop HTTP layer 7 stuff, but things like DNS protocol? You can't easily tell what's malicious and what's not (However, I've seen some dumb DDoS's where it's things like querying for XYZXYZXYZ...(lots of characters).org, or DNS reflection attacks, those are easy to filter). In those cases, it's really just a matter of overprovisioning your service, or suffer until the attackers run out of money or get bored.
- leowoo91 8y ago"run out of money or get bored" - made my day, this should also apply to the site owner. I bet there are even companies who are not aware that they are under attack since years (as loss is trivial yet)
- kkirsche 8y agoI’d recommend Radware instead of Arbor personally. But both have pros and cons
- techjuice 8y agoOnly thing you can do is have a bigger network than your attacker and/or insure there is equipment in front of your routers that can clean traffic entering or exiting your network. As time goes on the attacks will get more sophisticated and harder to stop.