DDoS Protection: A Deep Dive into Securing Your Website from Costly Cyber Attacks

Explore Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and how to prevent them from affecting you.

Last updated on Jun 25, 2025
Mirren McDade
Laura Iannini
Written by Mirren McDade Technical Review by Laura Iannini
DDoS Protection

TL;DR: DDoS Attacks

  • Definition: Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks flood websites or servers with excessive traffic from multiple sources (e.g., botnets) to disrupt services, targeting online resources like email or websites.
  • Market: DDoS attacks are rising, impacting organizations of all sizes, causing revenue loss, reputational damage, and potential penalties, often used as a distraction for other cybercrimes like data theft.

  • Benefits: Effective DDoS prevention/mitigation protects revenue, maintains brand reputation, ensures uptime, safeguards sensitive data, and builds customer trust through robust cybersecurity.

  • Challenges: Distributed attack sources complicate detection and mitigation, short attack durations still cause significant outages, and multi-vector attacks target multiple network layers simultaneously.

  • Key Features: Dedicated DDoS protection (traffic filtering, packet inspection, multi-layer mitigation), Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) for layer 7, Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) for layers 3-4, bot management (e.g., CAPTCHAs), rate limiting, and regular logging.

  • Future Trends: Increased adoption of AI-driven DDoS detection, enhanced multi-layer protection solutions, and integration with broader cybersecurity frameworks to counter sophisticated, evolving attacks.

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are on the rise, and no company, no matter their size, is immune to their tactics. Whether a small non-profit or a huge multinational conglomerate, DDoS attacks have the capacity to slow, or even prevent, access to online services such as email, websites, anything that faces the internet. One of these attacks can affect your internal teams, as well as customer facing elements, making a DDoS attack a significant problem. It can cause serious damage to brand reputation and can prevent your organization from taking any revenue, possibly even having to pay penalties or issue refunds.

In some cases, DDoS attacks are carried out with the purpose of distracting cybersecurity operations while other criminal activity, such as data theft or network infiltration, is underway.

In this article, we’ll delve into DDoS attacks, exploring how they work, some different types, and the prevention and mitigation strategies that can better protect your organization.

Want more stories like this? Subscribe to our Decrypted newsletter.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

What Are DDoS Attacks? 

DDoS stands for “Distributed denial of service.” A DDoS attack targets websites and servers by disrupting network services, with the goal of bringing down websites or other online resources by bombarding them with more traffic than they are designed to handle.

Unlike the smaller-scale DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, “Distributed” attacks use multiple sources (like a botnet) to generate malicious traffic. These sources can include thousands of infected devices across the globe, making the attack far more difficult to block or trace. This distributed nature not only increases the scale and impact of the attack, but also complicates mitigation efforts, as traffic appears to come from many legitimate IP addresses.

Typically, a DDoS attack will only last a short amount of time. This can range from a few seconds to a few minutes in the majority of cases. Despite their short duration, DDoS incidents can result in significant service outages, user dissatisfaction, and disruptions for operations. Service outages from a DDoS attack can result in lost productivity and revenue for organizations, as well as user dissatisfaction when trying to access online services.

Perpetrators of DDoS attacks can have different motivations, which may include:

  • Competitors attempting to interrupt other organizations 
  • Retaliation from disgruntled customer or former employee 
  • State-sponsored threat actors working towards political objectives

Types of DDoS Attacks 

The OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model represents how network systems are structured, and this is divided into seven layers: 

  1. Physical – The physical layer is the first and lowest layer and is associated with the physical connection between devices.
  2. Data link – This layer is the protocol layer that transfers data between nodes on network segment across the physical layer.
  3. Network – This layer provides the means of transferring variable-length network packets from a source to a destination host via one or more networks.
  4. Transport – The protocols of this layer provide end-to-end communication services for applications.
  5. Session – This layer provides the mechanism for opening, closing and managing a session between end-user application processes.
  6. Presentation – The presentation layer serves as the data translator for the network. It is sometimes referred to as the syntax layer.
  7. Application – This is an abstraction layer that specifies the shared communication protocols and interface methods used by hosts in a communications network.

Application layer attacks 

DDoS attacks on layer 7 involve overwhelming the systems responsible for generating web page responses based on HTTP requests; examples of this attack type are HTTP floods and slow POST attacks. In these attacks, multiple machines send HTTP requests for the same resource simultaneously, resulting in an overwhelmed server. These attacks are hard to detect as they mimic legitimate user traffic.

Protocol attacks 

Protocol attacks typically focus on layer 4, the transport layer. These attacks exploit weaknesses in Layer 3 and Layer 4 protocols, with the goal of exhausting all the resources available to servers or networking equipment such as firewalls and load balancers. An example of this attack type is SYN floods, which is when many TCP handshake requests are sent to the victim’s server from several spoofed IP addresses.

Volumetric attacks 

Volumetric attacks occur on layer 3, the network layer. These attacks flood a network with excessive traffic, measured in bits per second (bps), and aim to take up as much of the victim’s bandwidth as possible. An example of this attack type is DNS amplification. This is where the attacker will spoof the victim’s IP address and then make a very large request to an open DNS server. That DNS server will then generate a lengthy response and send that to the victim’s IP.

Multi-Vector Attacks

These combine multiple types of attacks, often hitting different layers simultaneously to bypass traditional defences and increase the likelihood of success. The goal with multi-vector DDoS attacks 3 is to overwhelm not just a single layer of an organization’s infrastructure but multiple layers at once, making detection and mitigation significantly more difficult.

DDoS Prevention And Mitigation Strategies 

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a major threat to all organizations, regardless of their size. Protecting against these attacks is crucial for keeping websites online and preventing business disruptions. 

DDoS prevention and mitigation help to safeguard revenue, preserve brand reputation, and prevent costly downtime. By effectively preventing DDoS attacks, sensitive user data is protected from attackers. Strong mitigation strategies support the building and maintenance of customer trust by demonstrating a commitment to cybersecurity and data protection, even when faced with sophisticated attacks.

Some specific prevention and mitigation strategies that can be implemented to reduce the risk of DDoS stacks include:

Dedicated DDoS Protection Solutions 

  • These solutions range from specialized network hardware to fully cloud-based DDoS defense services
  • Key features of these solutions can include traffic filtering, packet inspection, automatic detection / remediation, and monitoring
  • We recommend considering DDoS solutions that can mitigate attacks on multiple OSI layers 

Firewalls 

  • Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) provide protection on layer 7, the application layer. WAFs can safeguard web applications against malicious traffic as well as other threats such as malware. 
  • Normal network firewalls and Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) are mostly concerned with layers 3 and 4. These solutions allow or deny network traffic based on certain conditions, but NGFWs come with more advanced security functionality as well.

Bot Management 

  • Not all bot traffic is inherently bad, but large groups of bots are often used to carry out DDoS attacks 
  • One roadblock for preventing DDoS attacks is differentiating between normal spikes in demand from human traffic, benign bot traffic, and abnormal traffic generated by botnets 
  • Some sites use CAPTCHAs to verify that a site visitor is a human before granting access to certain resources 

Preventative Measures 

  • Regular logging can help make organizations aware of any unusual spikes in activity 
  • Rate limiting can be used to place a hard cap on how much traffic a server will process within a certain span of time 
  • Keep network infrastructure up to date with patches; poorly maintained infrastructure is more susceptible to service interruptions

Here are some related articles from Expert Insights on the topic of DDoS: 


Written By Written By

Mirren McDade is a senior writer and journalist at Expert Insights, spending each day researching, writing, editing and publishing content, covering a variety of topics and solutions, and interviewing industry experts. She is an experienced copywriter with a background in a range of industries, including cloud business technologies, cloud security, information security and cyber security, and has conducted interviews with several industry experts. Mirren holds a First Class Honors degree in English from Edinburgh Napier University.

Technical Review Technical Review
Laura Iannini
Laura Iannini Cybersecurity Analyst

Laura Iannini is a Cybersecurity Analyst at Expert Insights. With deep cybersecurity knowledge and strong research skills, she leads Expert Insights’ product testing team, conducting thorough tests of product features and in-depth industry analysis to ensure that Expert Insights’ product reviews are definitive and insightful. Laura also carries out wider analysis of vendor landscapes and industry trends to inform Expert Insights’ enterprise cybersecurity buyers’ guides, covering topics such as security awareness training, cloud backup and recovery, email security, and network monitoring. Prior to working at Expert Insights, Laura worked as a Senior Information Security Engineer at Constant Edge, where she tested cybersecurity solutions, carried out product demos, and provided high-quality ongoing technical support. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida.