The Current State of DDoS Defense

Abstract: A DDoS attack is an attempt to bring down a machine connected to the Internet. This is done by having multiple computers repeatedly sending requests to tie up a server making it unable to answer legitimate requests. DDoS attacks are currently one of the biggest security threats on the internet according to security experts. We used a qualitative interview with experts in IT security to gather data to our research. We found that most companies are lacking both in knowledge and in their protection against DDoS attacks. The best way to minimize this threat would be to build a system with redundancy, do a risk analysis and revise security policies. Most of the technologies reviewed were found ineffective because of the massive amount of data amplification attacks can generate. Ingress filtering showed promising results in preventing DDoS attacks by blocking packages with spoofed IP addresses thus preventing amplification attacks.