The proliferation of DDoS attacks of varying size, duration, and persistence has made DDoS protection a foundational part of every business and organization’s online presence. However, there are key considerations including network capacity, management capabilities, global distribution, alerting, reporting and support that security and risk management technical professionals need to evaluate when selecting a DDoS protection solution.
Gartner recently published the report Solution Comparison for DDoS Cloud Scrubbing Centers (ID G00467346), authored by Thomas Lintemuth, Patrick Hevesi and Sushil Aryal. This report enables customers to view a side-by-side solution comparison of different DDoS cloud scrubbing centers measured against common assessment criteria. If you have a Gartner subscription, you can view the report here. Cloudflare has received the greatest number of ‘High’ ratings as compared to the 6 other DDoS vendors across 23 assessment criteria in the report.
From our perspective, the nature of DDoS attacks has transformed, as the economics and ease of launching a DDoS attack has changed dramatically. With a rise in cost-effective capabilities of launching a DDoS attack, we have observed a rise in the number of under 10 Gbps DDoS network-level attacks, as shown in the figure below. Even though 10 Gbps from an attack size perspective does not seem that large, it is large enough to significantly affect a majority of the websites existing today.
At the same time, larger-sized DDoS attacks are still prevalent and have the capability of crippling the availability of an organization’s infrastructure. In March 2020, Cloudflare observed numerous 300+ Gbps attacks with the largest attack being 550 Gbps in size.
In the report Gartner also observes a similar trend, “In speaking with the vendors for this research, Gartner discovered a consistent theme: Clients are experiencing more frequent smaller attacks versus larger volumetric attacks.” In addition, they also observe that “For enterprises with Internet connections up to and exceeding 10 Gbps, frequent but short attacks up to 10 Gbps are still quite disruptive without DDoS protection. Not to say that large attacks have gone away. We haven’t seen a 1-plus Tbps attack since spring 2018, but attacks over 500 Gbps are still common.”
Gartner recommends in the report to “Choose a provider that offers scrubbing capacity of three times the largest documented volumetric attack on your continent.”
From an application-level DDoS attack perspective an interesting DDoS attack observed and mitigated by Cloudflare last year, is shown below. This HTTP DDoS attack had a peak of 1.4M requests per second, which isn’t highly rate-intensive. However, the fact that the 1.1M IPs from which the attack originated were unique and not spoofed made the attack quite interesting. The unique IP addresses were actual clients who were able to complete a TCP and HTTPS handshake.
Cloudflare’s cloud-delivered DDoS solution provides key features that enable security professionals to protect their organizations and customers against even the most sophisticated DDoS attacks. Some of the key features and benefits include:
Whether you’re part of a large global enterprise, or use Cloudflare for your personal site, we want to make sure that you’re protected and also have the visibility that you need. DDoS Protection is included as part of every Cloudflare service. Enterprise-level plans include advanced mitigation, detailed reporting, enriched logs, productivity enhancements and fine-grained controls. Enterprise Plan customers also receive access to dedicated customer success and solution engineering.
To learn more about Cloudflare’s DDoS solution contact us or get started.
*Gartner “Solution Comparison for DDoS Cloud Scrubbing Centers,” Thomas Lintemuth, Patrick Hevesi, Sushil Aryal, 16 April 2020
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