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Staying Ahead in the Game of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Steve Persch
Pantheon

Too much traffic can crash a website. I learned that hard lesson relatively early in my web development career. Web teams recoil in horror when they realize their own success has crashed their site. Remember when Coinbase spent millions of dollars on a Super Bowl commercial that successfully drove traffic to their site and app? Their infrastructure got run over.

That stampede of traffic is even more horrifying when it's part of a malicious denial of service attack. I count my lucky stars that in my previous jobs of building and running sites I never went head-to-head with a determined attacker. I would have lost. Most web teams would if they were playing the game of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) on their own.

These attacks are becoming more common, more sophisticated and increasingly tied to ransomware-style demands. So it's no wonder that the threat of DDoS remains one of the many things that keep IT and marketing leaders up at night.

There's no one easy fix for DDoS attacks. DDoS isn't a bug — it's more like a never-ending game. But to understand the nature of the problem, we need to start from the basics.

Opening Play: Simple Servers Serving Websites

The game can start simple enough. Web teams put websites on the internet with servers. Whether those servers are in a basement office, on some virtual machine, or part of shared hosting, they are largely good enough to send out some HTTP responses.

Now it's the hackers' turn. Even though those servers are intended to only serve HTTP responses, they are still computers on the internet. So they're vulnerable to all kinds of asymmetrical networking attacks that exhaust their resources. How about a UDP flood? Game over.

Add a Firewall

Well, the game is never over. Get a firewall. That can keep out network-level attacks and you can block specific IP addresses. You're winning the game now!

Wait a second … Do you even want to be playing this cat-and-mouse game? While you're thinking about that, the hackers move on to attacking your DNS provider.

Looking for Weak Links

As you're scouring logs and blocking IPs, you're also on the phone with your DNS provider asking what's going on over there. Maybe it's time to switch DNS providers? Ugh, that'll eat up a ton of time and effort and that yields zero positive value to your stakeholders. They're asking for actual improvements to the site that they can see, not the switching of invisible building blocks.

That tension propelled the growth of extremely large services like Cloudflare, which consolidated some of these concerns. Lots of sites moved DNS there to get their free CDN service. Cloudflare withstood low-level network attacks that could overwhelm via sheer volume even a firewalled website. Still, the internet never sleeps. Hackers don't seem to sleep much either because they are finding more ways to slide through the protections of these platforms.

The Street Finds Its Own Use For Things

Many of the technological advances in the 2010s that seemed so useful for benevolent purposes like browser automation are also really handy for generating fake traffic that seems real. The capacity to script browsers that we leverage for visual regression testing can also trick a CDN into thinking that fake traffic is real traffic. The street finds its own use for things, as the writer William Gibson once put it.

When the attack is coming in the form of a lot of web browsers making legitimate-seeming requests, the current state of the art is either an expensive WAF solution, which still requires some ongoing maintenance, or an "I'm under attack" mode. That can keep your site up by adding a CAPTCHA test. However, it isn't acceptable for most teams over the long term to leverage a CDN layer, which is supposed to make the site faster while also making the overall experience slower by forcing the real visitors to pass through some kind of virtual security line. Ugh.

The Winning Move Is Not to Play Alone

Back to the same question from earlier. Do you want to be playing this game at all?

I don't personally want to play in the game, so it's key to identify a platform solution that accelerates and eases management by taking whole classes of problems off the table. Any given web team could do the toiling work of updating PHP versions, but the modern sophistication of DDOS has evolved to require a sizable platform WebOps team that can hold the line.

Steve Persch is Director of Developer Experience at Pantheon

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Staying Ahead in the Game of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Steve Persch
Pantheon

Too much traffic can crash a website. I learned that hard lesson relatively early in my web development career. Web teams recoil in horror when they realize their own success has crashed their site. Remember when Coinbase spent millions of dollars on a Super Bowl commercial that successfully drove traffic to their site and app? Their infrastructure got run over.

That stampede of traffic is even more horrifying when it's part of a malicious denial of service attack. I count my lucky stars that in my previous jobs of building and running sites I never went head-to-head with a determined attacker. I would have lost. Most web teams would if they were playing the game of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) on their own.

These attacks are becoming more common, more sophisticated and increasingly tied to ransomware-style demands. So it's no wonder that the threat of DDoS remains one of the many things that keep IT and marketing leaders up at night.

There's no one easy fix for DDoS attacks. DDoS isn't a bug — it's more like a never-ending game. But to understand the nature of the problem, we need to start from the basics.

Opening Play: Simple Servers Serving Websites

The game can start simple enough. Web teams put websites on the internet with servers. Whether those servers are in a basement office, on some virtual machine, or part of shared hosting, they are largely good enough to send out some HTTP responses.

Now it's the hackers' turn. Even though those servers are intended to only serve HTTP responses, they are still computers on the internet. So they're vulnerable to all kinds of asymmetrical networking attacks that exhaust their resources. How about a UDP flood? Game over.

Add a Firewall

Well, the game is never over. Get a firewall. That can keep out network-level attacks and you can block specific IP addresses. You're winning the game now!

Wait a second … Do you even want to be playing this cat-and-mouse game? While you're thinking about that, the hackers move on to attacking your DNS provider.

Looking for Weak Links

As you're scouring logs and blocking IPs, you're also on the phone with your DNS provider asking what's going on over there. Maybe it's time to switch DNS providers? Ugh, that'll eat up a ton of time and effort and that yields zero positive value to your stakeholders. They're asking for actual improvements to the site that they can see, not the switching of invisible building blocks.

That tension propelled the growth of extremely large services like Cloudflare, which consolidated some of these concerns. Lots of sites moved DNS there to get their free CDN service. Cloudflare withstood low-level network attacks that could overwhelm via sheer volume even a firewalled website. Still, the internet never sleeps. Hackers don't seem to sleep much either because they are finding more ways to slide through the protections of these platforms.

The Street Finds Its Own Use For Things

Many of the technological advances in the 2010s that seemed so useful for benevolent purposes like browser automation are also really handy for generating fake traffic that seems real. The capacity to script browsers that we leverage for visual regression testing can also trick a CDN into thinking that fake traffic is real traffic. The street finds its own use for things, as the writer William Gibson once put it.

When the attack is coming in the form of a lot of web browsers making legitimate-seeming requests, the current state of the art is either an expensive WAF solution, which still requires some ongoing maintenance, or an "I'm under attack" mode. That can keep your site up by adding a CAPTCHA test. However, it isn't acceptable for most teams over the long term to leverage a CDN layer, which is supposed to make the site faster while also making the overall experience slower by forcing the real visitors to pass through some kind of virtual security line. Ugh.

The Winning Move Is Not to Play Alone

Back to the same question from earlier. Do you want to be playing this game at all?

I don't personally want to play in the game, so it's key to identify a platform solution that accelerates and eases management by taking whole classes of problems off the table. Any given web team could do the toiling work of updating PHP versions, but the modern sophistication of DDOS has evolved to require a sizable platform WebOps team that can hold the line.

Steve Persch is Director of Developer Experience at Pantheon

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As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...