The best protection against DoS attacks and DDoS attacks is a multilayered posture that can protect websites, applications, APIs, authoritative DNS, and network resources by using technologies that have a proven record for blocking these events.
Preventing denial-of-service attacks
While denial-of-service (DoS) attacks or distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are among the oldest types of cyberthreats, they remain highly popular as an instrument of mass disruption. DoS protection has become more challenging in recent years as attacks continue to grow in size and as the number and combination of attack vectors become more complex. As security architectures become more dependent on cloud-hosted environments, many organizations struggle to keep internet-facing assets protected with the same level of DoS protection as those located within the data center.
A DoS or DDoS attack is like a traffic jam
From a high level, a DoS or DDoS attack is like an unexpected traffic jam caused by hundreds of bogus ride-share requests. The requests appear to be legitimate to ride-share services, and they dispatch drivers for pickup that inevitably clog up the city streets. This prevents regular legitimate traffic from arriving at its destination.
The challenge of cloud-based DDoS protection
As more enterprises decommission traditional data centers and move applications to the cloud, security teams require stronger, adaptive defenses to keep web-facing assets and internet services protected. However, many cloud-hosted IPs fall outside of the enterprise’s direct control, making them vulnerable to successful DoS and DDoS attacks, if they are not properly protected.
Threat actors, highly aware of this migration to the cloud, are eager to exploit weaknesses in an organization’s security posture that are the result of inconsistent security policies and difficulty troubleshooting across a fragmented cloud-hosted infrastructure.
To make things more complicated, responsibility for security within public cloud environments is inconsistent from provider to provider. Many organizations make inaccurate assumptions about the level of security a cloud provider offers, potentially leaving them exposed to attacks, like authentication abuse, ARP attacks, QoS issues, incorrectly configured MTU settings, and a large number of other outbound risks.
To protect their assets in the cloud, security teams are seeking solutions that allow them to orchestrate DDoS and DoS protection from a single pane of glass, providing greater visibility as well as streamlined reporting that can improve event data correlation.
However, many of the in-house DDoS mitigation solutions offered by cloud service providers fall short in key areas, including visibility, reporting, and SLAs. Some solutions offer little to no transparency, while other providers cannot offer a time-to-mitigate SLA that guarantees uptime and availability. Additionally, many cloud service providers do not offer on-demand access to 24/7 support from a global security operations center (SOC).
As the largest, most trusted cloud delivery platform for web security, Akamai offers purpose-built DoS protection that delivers increased resiliency, dedicated scrubbing capacity, and higher quality of mitigation to stop denial-of-service attacks in the cloud before they reach applications, data centers, and infrastructure.
DDoS protection with Akamai
Akamai delivers a suite of leading security, cloud computing, and delivery solutions that enable global companies to make life better for billions of people, billions of times a day. With the world’s most distributed computing platform from cloud to edge, we enable businesses to stay safe from threats without compromising performance or customer experiences.
Our security solutions take a holistic approach to DoS protection, serving as a first line of defense and providing protection through dedicated edge, distributed DNS, and diverse cloud mitigation strategies. In contrast to other cloud security provider architectures that are built as an “all in one” solution, we offer purpose-built DDoS clouds that deliver increased resiliency, dedicated scrubbing capacity, and higher quality of mitigation.
As a result, Akamai technologies have mitigated some of the largest DDoS attacks ever recorded on the internet. Our proactive mitigation controls offer true zero-second mitigation and an industry-leading SLA. Our unparalleled capacity and scale enable us to provide protection services for multiple clients while fighting multiple DDoS attacks at the same time.
Whether your security teams are looking to protect individual applications, entire data centers, or authoritative DNS, our DDoS protection and DoS protection solutions deliver higher capacity, greater resiliency, more consistency of mitigation and faster remediation.
Multiple DoS and DDoS security solutions
DoS and DDoS protection technology from Akamai boosts resilience and provides a multilayered defense against the largest and most complex attacks. Our purpose-built solutions avoid single points of failure and reduce risk across IT environments by fine-tuning mitigation for your web and internet-facing services wherever they are hosted.
DoS and DDoS protection for websites, applications, and APIs
Akamai App & API Protector provides a holistic set of protections designed to protect entire web and API estates. Built with customer-focused automation and simplicity, App & API Protector combines industry-leading technologies in web application firewall, API security, bot mitigation, and DDoS and DoS protection in a solution that is easy to use.
Defenses for internet-facing infrastructure
Akamai Prolexic (link to https://www.akamai.com/products/prolexic-solutions) provides cloud-delivered mitigation across all ports and protocols to protect data centers and hybrid infrastructure from DDoS attacks before they become business-impacting events. Prolexic stops attacks in the cloud, before they reach applications, data centers, and public or private internet-facing infrastructure. With 20+ global, high-capacity scrubbing centers, Prolexic stops attacks closer to the source to maximize performance for users and maintain network resiliency through cloud distribution.
DNS security to ensure nonstop availability of web apps and APIs
Akamai Edge DNS is a cloud-based DNS solution that delivers 24/7 DNS availability while improving responsiveness and defending against the largest DDoS attacks. Built on a globally distributed anycast network, Edge DNS can replace existing DNS infrastructure or be implemented as a secondary DNS service to augment current infrastructure. This Akamai solution directs users to a high-performing DNS server based on network conditions, improving responsiveness and accelerating resolutions for users as they connect to websites and applications from anywhere in the world. Akamai’s highly scalable DNS platform provides sufficient capacity to absorb the largest DDoS attacks while responding to legitimate user requests and ensuring faster online experiences, even during an attack.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
A DoS attack, or denial-of-service attack, is designed to render a website, router, server, or network unavailable to legitimate users. A DoS attack is launched from a single computer, while a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack uses a botnet or distributed network of IPv4 or IPv6 addresses — a robot network of hijacked computers, machines, or IoT devices — to attack a target from multiple locations.
A DoS or DDoS attack attempts to flood a server, website, network device or machine with so much malicious traffic that it is unable to operate. In a volumetric attack — such as an ICMP flood or a UDP flood attack — attackers overwhelm a target with massive amounts of traffic, overloading the system, or network path to the system, while preventing legitimate traffic and users from accessing that resource.
A protocol attack such as a SYN flood attempts to consume and exhaust the compute capacity of network infrastructure resources like firewalls or load-balancers by sending malicious connection requests that exploit protocol communications. In an application-layer attack like Slowloris, attackers exploit the capacity of a web server, application server, or database by exhausting the amount of requests it can handle while flying under the radar of low request volumes, rendering it unavailable to users.
Why customers choose Akamai
Akamai powers and protects life online. Leading companies worldwide choose Akamai to build, deliver, and secure their digital experiences — helping billions of people live, work, and play every day. Akamai Connected Cloud, a massively distributed edge and cloud platform, puts apps and experiences closer to users and keeps threats farther away.