DDoS Protection (DDoS)
WAF Features
Quick Definition
Security measures and services that defend against attacks designed to overwhelm systems with traffic and make them unavailable to legitimate users.
What is DDoS Protection?
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection encompasses the technologies and strategies used to defend against attacks that attempt to make a service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources. DDoS attacks can target the network layer (volumetric attacks), transport layer (protocol attacks), or application layer (HTTP floods).
Types of DDoS attacks:
- Volumetric attacks: Flood the network bandwidth (UDP floods, ICMP floods, amplification attacks)
- Protocol attacks: Exploit protocol weaknesses (SYN floods, Ping of Death)
- Application layer attacks: Target web applications (HTTP GET/POST floods, Slowloris)
DDoS protection works by:
- Traffic scrubbing - filtering malicious traffic while allowing legitimate traffic
- Rate limiting - controlling the number of requests from a single source
- Anycast distribution - spreading traffic across multiple data centers
- Behavioral analysis - identifying abnormal traffic patterns
- Challenge-response - using CAPTCHAs or JavaScript challenges to verify real users