Is it possible to prevent DDoS attacks?

Question

I recently read that certain industries—including the one I work in—are more likely than others to be targeted by a DDoS attack. Can you give me some tips on how to prevent DDoS attacks?

See http://serverfault.com/questions/531941/i-am-under-ddos-what-can-i-do — Pacerier, Dec 07 '14 at 17:32

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered May 17 '14 at 14:59

2

Prevent? No. If someone wants to try attacking you, they'll do so.

It's possible to mitigate with a combination of tactics (protection services like CloudFlare, engineering in things like rate limiting, etc.), but not to prevent.

answered May 17 '14 at 14:59

ceejayoz

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This is not an answer. It’s a comment to a vague question. – Giacomo1968 May 17 '14 at 15:02
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Actually it is an answer. It is technocally not possible to block the incomine traffic of a DDOS attack, as the OP says. – TomTom May 17 '14 at 15:23
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@JakeGould - it absolutely *is* an answer, and a good one at that. – EEAA May 17 '14 at 16:03

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 17 '14 at 15:03

Buy hardware firewalls and bigger pipes. You can mitigate the attacks that way. Lots of businesses like SolidShellSecurity and Staminus Coms for example offer that protection on a need-to-use basis.

In most cases, 10GBs worth of protection will protect you from the majority of attacks.

You can also have your upstream block UDP ports to prevent common UDP floods from coming in. But you can't very well block an attack till you know what kind.

You could also harden your local server from small attacks but in the end, you need a data center or upstream provider who will and can help you drop and block attacks.

This is a good guide on how to *mitigate* attacks. The question, though, was about how to prevent them, which is impossible. — EEAA, May 17 '14 at 16:04

Is it possible to prevent DDoS attacks?

2 Answers2