How to Protect Against DDoS Attack?

What is DDoS Attack?

When a website that had previously been working like clockwork suddenly goes down at 3 a.m., it may not just be a technical glitch. It could be a DDoS. A quiet but devastating attack in which thousands (or even millions) of requests simultaneously hit the server like a crowd on sale. He gets drowned in traffic and shuts down. And that’s it: business is booming, users are angry, and the site owner is in a panic.

DDoS is not about “viruses” or “password hacking.” It’s about chaos and overload. Attackers simply flood the system with so many requests that it can’t handle them. It doesn’t matter why they’re doing it—for money, for fun, or for political reasons—the result is the same: you’re offline.

Scary, right? Yes. But the good news is that you can protect yourself. In fact, you should. The main thing is to understand what you’re dealing with and not to hope that “it will pass”.

In this guide, you will learn: what DDoS software is really about, how to recognize it and, most importantly, how to protect against DDoS attacks. Without unnecessary techno-jargon, but with concrete solutions. Because in the Internet, the winner is not the strongest – but the one who can react quickly and competently.

What is DDoS? 

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) is an attack in which a huge number of devices (bots, infected computers, even smart kettles) simultaneously send a wave of requests to a server. The server simply can’t handle the flow and… shuts down, freezes, or stops responding. The whole point is overload, not “hacking” or “penetration”.

But it’s important to understand: there are different types of DDoS attacks – and this is where the most interesting part begins.

The Main Types of DDoS Attacks

1. Volumetric (volume) attacks, This is a real avalanche of data. The attacker simply floods the channel with “garbage” traffic: UDP flood, ICMP flood — anything that can quickly occupy bandwidth. The site doesn’t seem to be broken, but access to it is like through an IV drip.
2. Protocol attacks (at the protocol level), the goal is network resources. The most classic example is SYN flood. The attack simulates attempts to connect, but does not complete them. As a result, the server holds these “empty” connections and eventually crashes.
3. Application-layer (at the application level) are the most insidious attacks. They may appear to be regular users, but they make thousands of requests to heavy pages (such as search or databases). An example is the HTTP flood attack.
4. Combined (multi-vector) attack is a mix of the above attacks. They first flood the network and then target the application. They are harder to detect and even harder to stop.

Why do DDoS Happen? Top 5 Reasons

When you hear the term “DDoS attack,” you might immediately imagine some evil hacker with three monitors and green lines of code. However, the reality is much simpler and more terrifying. A DDoS attack can be launched by anyone, whether it’s a high school student, a business competitor, a political activist, or a criminal group. The motivations vary.

1. Money is the driving force behind chaos, often a DDoS attack is simply a form of extortion. First, the website goes down, and then the owner receives an email saying, “Transfer X amount of Bitcoin, and everything will work again.” This is classic online extortion.
2. Competitive struggle may sound crazy. However, businesses do order attacks on their competitors’ websites before promotions, sales, or during peak sales hours. If you can’t sell, they can.
3. Ideology and protests, for example, hacktivism is when an attack becomes a form of protest. For example, blocking a government website, a corporation, or a news resource that you disagree with.
4. Entertainment or a test, sometimes people attack for fun. Young hackers just train or “measure their powers”. And sometimes someone wants to check the security of their own system, but they do it through external resources, which is illegal.
5. Diversionary tactics, while the entire team is dealing with a DDoS attack, the real attack is happening elsewhere, such as a database breach, data theft, or virus injection. This is the level of “special operation.”

The conclusion is simple: DDoS is not about cyberpunk. It’s about money, influence, and control. And the more dependent your website is, the more likely it is to annoy someone.

How to Identify DDoS? 

A DDoS attack is a tricky thing. It doesn’t always start with fanfare and explosions. Sometimes, a website just starts behaving… strangely. It loads slowly, pages don’t open, and the admin nervously checks the server every 5 minutes. Understanding and realising it will help you to protect against DDoS your services. So, how can you tell if it’s a DDoS tools attack?

Main Signs of DDoS

• A sudden decrease in website speed if everything used to fly, and now every page takes 10 seconds to load, this is already a wake-up call.
• Complete inaccessibility of the resource when the site can simply “lie down.” The user comes in – and in response: 502 Bad Gateway or silence at all. Hosting is overloaded.
• Unusually high traffic in logs or monitoring systems, a sharp increase in requests is visible – especially from the same IPs or from suspicious regions. If you want to know why websites check the IP of their visitors, you can check our article.
• CPU and memory load when the server starts to choke: CPU, RAM indicators grow, and the load doesn’t seem to make sense — the databases are not touched, and resources are being consumed.
• Suspicious activity at the application level, for example, a thousand requests arrive at the site’s search bar in a second. A user can’t behave like this. It’s an automaton.

What’s Important?

DDoS likes to disguise itself as a failure. Therefore, it is important not to panic, but to immediately turn on the logic: compare indicators, analyze behavior, and check traffic sources. The sooner you realize that this is an attack, the sooner you can stop the damage.
Because in the digital world, the speed of reaction is already half the victory.

What is DDoS Protecting Strategy. How to mitigate DDoS?

Imagine: you run a business calmly, customers visit the website, everything works like clockwork — and suddenly, at one point, everything gets up. Nothing is loading, phones are bursting, and the server is beeping from overload. Congratulations — you have become a victim of a DDoS tools attack.

What to do? It’s too late to panic. You need to prepare in advance. You can protect from DDoS, and it’s not even that difficult if you approach it wisely.

Here’s what really works:

1. CDN and load distribution
   
   Services like Cloudflare or Akamai are like a security guard at the entrance. They take the hit and filter the traffic, preventing junk from reaching you. And Anycast technology simply distributes the load across different servers around the world.
   
2. Smart infrastructure.
   
   Automatic scaling (autoscaling) helps you connect more servers when things get busy. Well, no one has canceled the hardware — specialized devices are able to cut off malicious traffic before it reaches the site.
   
3. Software protection.
   
   WAF is like an “antivirus” at the site level: it looks at what kind of request it is and decides whether to let it in or not. And there is also rate limiting (limiting the frequency of requests), CAPTCHA and bot-filters that cut off automatic attacks

And most importantly — do not rely on one way.

DDoS is not a bullet, but a volley of hundreds of cannons. Therefore, protection should be multi-level. Let it be not just a lock on the door, but a system with cameras, an alarm and a backup exit.

Useful Anti DDoS Attack Tools  

When it comes to serious attacks, homemade defenses are like an umbrella in a hurricane. It helps, but not for long. This is where professional solutions come in, designed specifically to take the hits and hold the line when your servers start to struggle.

Cloudflare — the first line of defense

Cloudflare has long ceased to be just a CDN service. Today it is a whole platform that works as a shield between the site and everything that tries to “pile” it with traffic. Its DDoS protection starts automatically: it analyzes the flow of incoming requests, recognizes suspicious patterns, blocks the excess — and all this in milliseconds, before the attack reaches the server.

The uniqueness of Cloudflare is that it stands right “at the edge of the Internet”, distributing traffic over thousands of nodes around the world. It’s like having turnstiles at every airport so no mob can break into your office. Even the biggest attacks crumble before they even begin.

Fortinet — all-in-one protection

Fortinet acts as a gatekeeper – only this gatekeeper is armed with machine learning, signature analysis, and deep behavioral monitoring systems. Their solutions are not just a filter, but a full-fledged security network that includes firewalls (FortiGate), traffic sensors, and intelligent analysis engines. Fortinet is able not only to stop showers of garbage requests, but also to recognize hybrid attacks where DDoS is used together with other techniques.

This is especially important for large companies, where protection must be built right into the infrastructure — not from the outside, but directly into the core of the network. Here, DDoS does not even reach applications: Fortinet intercepts the threat even at the approaches.

Imperva — if you need control over applications

Imperva specializes in cleaning up web traffic down to the last suspicious line. Its DDoS protection acts as a digital filter that separates the wheat from the chaff in the streams of millions of requests. The platform can detect not only classic attacks but also advanced scenarios like “low and slow,” where malicious traffic flows slowly and discreetly like a drip.

Imperva can even detect such patterns. It learns from real traffic, builds behavioral models, and automatically decides who to let in and who to keep out. And if something doesn’t make sense, you can check the dashboard and see everything in real-time, down to the specific IP.

Check Point — everything under the hood

Check Point approaches the DDoS problem with engineering precision. Their solutions integrate protection across the entire network architecture, from gateways to the cloud. DDoS protection is not a separate feature, but rather a part of a unified security ecosystem. Their systems are capable of distinguishing between legitimate traffic spikes (such as those caused by sales on a website) and actual attacks.

This is achieved not through strict blocking, but through intelligent filtering and adaptive analysis. Check Point excels in handling multi-layered attacks, where HTTP flooding occurs from the outside and resource depletion attempts occur from within. In such cases, it’s not just a filter that operates, but a true scenario-based analysis, where every piece of traffic is scrutinized based on logic.

We prepared a broad table with useful ways and options which may help you to protect against DDoS attacks.

Table of Tools to Protect Against DDoS Attacks

How to Protect Against DDoS when It is Hapenning 

When it eventually did happen, the site went down, the chat panicked, customers couldn’t log in, and tech support was in shock – it was important not to rush around, but to act according to plan. DDoS is not the end of the world if you know what to do.

What to Do When You are Attacked:

1. Don’t panic — watch, the first step is to make sure that this is a DDoS. Compare peak loads, check logs: a sharp surge in traffic without explanation is a clear sign.
2. Notify the provider or hosting because many providers have their own filtering systems. Sometimes a single call or email is enough to solve part of the problem automatically.
3. Enable emergency filters If you have a WAF or CDN configured, now is the time to enable aggressive filtering: captchas, blocks, and request frequency limits.
4. Redirect traffic (if possible) with the help of Anycast or proxy servers, you can temporarily “spray” the load. Even a temporary solution gives you a head start for recovery.
5. Block malicious IP range and analyze the logs: if you can see where the traffic is coming from, block it manually or through automatic rules.
6. Document everything, record your actions, save logs, screenshots, and reports — this will be useful for analysis and communication with your provider.

Remember: the reaction should be quick, but cold. The less emotion, the faster everything will return to normal. In DDoS attacks, it’s not about having a more powerful server, but about maintaining control.

When it’s Over, how to mitigate DDoS Attack After?

When the attack finally ends, the silence seems almost strange. Everything is working again, customers are returning, and the team is taking a breath… but it’s too early to relax. After a DDoS attack, it’s important not just to “fix” the website but to properly recover. Otherwise, the next attack could be fatal.

How to Protect Against DDoS Attack in the Future?

1. Check if everything is working as it should, go through the main website pages, check the API, forms, and user accounts. Sometimes, after an overload, there are bugs that don’t stand out immediately.
2. Analyze logs and traffic, look at where the traffic came from: IP addresses, regions, and request frequency. This will help you understand the type of attack and prepare for similar scenarios in the future.
3. Identify vulnerabilities, If something didn’t work, why? Maybe the WAF was inactive, the limits weren’t set correctly, or the CDN missed something. Now is the time to fix it.
4. Do a post-mortem, gather the team and go through the steps: what you did, what worked, where you lost time. This analysis helps turn stress into experience.
5. Update your response plan, add what was missing: contacts, scripts, backup scenarios. The next attack should not take you by surprise.
6. Inform your users (if necessary), was it a simple attack? Explain what happened. No panic, but be honest. People value transparency.

DDoS is not just about “surviving.” It’s an opportunity to strengthen your system. The key is to remember to draw conclusions while the memory is still fresh.

How to Protect DDoS

DDoS is like bad weather: you never know when it’s going to hit, but it’s better to have an umbrella on hand. If you want to not just deal with attacks, but prevent them in advance, you need proper prevention. And no, it’s not just about “buying how to protect against DDoS attack courses” – it’s an entire approach to stability.

What you can (and should) do before an attack

• Set up traffic monitoring If you don’t know what a normal day on your website looks like, you won’t know when it becomes abnormal. Use analytics, logs, and alerts. Let the system notify you when something goes wrong.
• Conduct stress tests beforehand, check how many requests your website can handle. Where are the bottlenecks? There are services that help simulate load and check how the system behaves under pressure.
• Connect anti-DDoS services in advance like Cloudflare, Imperva, Check Point — all of this works more effectively if it’s turned on before the trouble. Learning how to protect against DDoS attacks the hard way is not the best option. Let the services do their job and prevent all possible loses and problems.
• Prepare an action plan, you should have a plan: who is responsible, what to do, where to call. Like a fire alarm, the sooner you start responding, the fewer losses.
• Train your team, DDoS is not only about techies. Even a manager should know what to tell a client if the site doesn’t load. Everybody on your team should know how to mitigate against DDoS attacks.

Prevention is not an expense, but insurance. And it’s better to spend some time now than to lose money, reputation, and nerves later.

Frequently Asked Questions