Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a plague with consequences just as horrific as ransomware attacks. As a blackmail scheme, a targeted attack, or a form of virtual vandalism, a swarm of attackers floods a website with an influx of requests in an attempt to shut it down. In the past, attackers often used reflection attacks, which involve an attacker sending several packets with the IP address of the victim as the sender to servers, which then acknowledge the requests with long answers. Because of the spoofed IP address, however, these massive responses go to the victim's address.

Even companies with Internet connectivity in the 10 to 40Gbps range can be powerless against attacks with several hundreds of gigabits per second bandwidth. An Internet search with the keywords "biggest DDoS" regularly shows new and increasing values for such attacks; the peak is currently around 1Tbps. With the Internet of Things, attackers can now choose platforms that are much easier to use; for example, hacked surveillance cameras, refrigerators, and cheap routers have been responsible for recent attacks. In this article, I look at methods, providers, and the costs of protecting your connectivity.

The DDoS Family

Roughly three categories of DDoS attacks can be distinguished. Flooding, as the method described above is known, occurs when a large group of computers send many large data packets to a victim, exhausting the bandwidth or loading the infrastructure to its full capacity from the excessive number of individual packets.

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