Before we get into the details of what Volumetric DDoS Attacks are, let us first talk about DDoS. It stands for Distributed Denial Of Service. What happens during a DDoS attack is that a large packet of bots visits a website until the website’s bandwidth is overwhelmed, rendering it inaccessible to visitors.
DDoS attacks are nothing new and they are ever-increasing in number. More than 38% respondents of a survey conducted in 2014 reported DDoS attacks up from over 25 percent in 2015. These attacks are substantial attacks, sending over 400 Gbps in attacks with other attacks at 100 Gbps. As they become larger, they have also become more difficult to identify.
There are several types of DDoS attacks. One type of attack is the volumetric DDoS attacks. What is this type of DDoS? It is one of the most common attacks, accounting for around 65% of all reported attacks.
These use a botnet to flood the hosting network with an overwhelming amount of seemingly legitimate traffic. The new traffic consumes a large amount of bandwidth, making the attacked website painfully slow, or worse, non-functional.
A volumetric attack could be a User Datagram Protocol or UDP floods. With this type of attack, random ports on a particular server are flooded with packets of UDP, causing the server to respond to non-existent applications. This hampers the ability of the system to respond to legitimate applications.
Another type of volumetric DDos attack is the ICMP, which floods echo requests from different spoofed Ip addresses. As the server processes and replies to the fake request, it becomes overloaded and unable to valid ICMP requests.
Although DDoS attacks have increasingly become common, thankfully, the number of companies that offer remediation have also increased. If your website has been the subject of an attack, contact a DDoS remediation company right away.