Bots are everywhere, and they’re getting sneaky. Despite the best efforts of security teams and cybersecurity tools, malicious bots are improving their ability to slip past defenses and begin DDoS attacks on websites and applications. Given that the average DDoS attack costs over $6000 per minute, organizations looking to spend that money on more strategic things should invest in DDoS protection.
However, not all DDoS protection solutions are created equal. To combat the rise of more subtle, less detectable bots, a solution built with AI and machine learning may be the best option for many organizations.
The Challenge of DDoS Protection
DDoS protection is important for a number of reasons, but one of the most pressing reasons to focus on prevention is that this type of attack is very difficult to stop once it has started. The reason for this is server overload.
When a legitimate user tries to access a website, the user’s device sends a request to the website’s host server. The server must then allocate resources to respond. In a DDoS attack, an extremely large number of devices, which have been recruited into a botnet, overwhelm the server with requests.
The server then uses up all of its resources responding to the bots, and legitimate traffic cannot access the website. Your customers are unlikely to return to a website that doesn’t work, which can lead to damage to your company’s reputation and financial losses. No web traffic quickly becomes no revenue.
DDoS attacks are tricky to stop before they’re well underway. Attackers are becoming more sophisticated every year, which is clear based on the growing complexity of the average DDoS attack. Bots have become more attuned to typical behavior patterns and are able to mimic them. This allows them to evade detection by most traditional protection tools.
The Role of AI in DDoS Protection
Because of this improved mimicry, DDoS protection measures can sometimes have difficulty differentiating between legitimate and attack traffic without flagging and blocking real users and customers. Without accurate identification, your DDoS protection tactics and tools may do more harm than good.
Newer protection tools have begun implementing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to more accurately identify unusual activity and attack traffic. Including AI in your DDoS protection strategy can have the following results:
- Faster detection and lower false positives. AI and ML pick up on patterns that traditional monitoring tools and the human eye don’t necessarily see right away. This significantly improves detection accuracy.
- Reduced impacts on network performance. A frequent criticism of DDoS protection tools is that they take up already limited server space. However, because of AI tool speeds, the server is able to filter and respond to the request more quickly than it could with tools that don’t use AI.
- Reduced downtime. Generally, the speed increases associated with AI and ML benefit your applications and network. If an attack does slip past your defenses, an AI-informed tool will still detect and respond to threats more quickly than other protective measures.
- Constant monitoring. To ensure that attacks are caught as quickly as possible, an effective AI-informed DDoS protection solution will be constantly scanning and analyzing traffic.
- Automated rules updates. AI and ML have the ability to adjust their rules for blocking attacks based on real-time malicious activity patterns. Rather than manual changes, the DDoS solution will adapt on its own.
While standard solutions can still protect you from DDoS attacks, AI and ML make DDoS protection faster and more accurate while also saving you time. They catch more sophisticated attacks, which makes them an important tool to handle increasingly evasive bots.
Enhancing DDoS Protection
To find the best DDoS protection, look for cutting-edge solutions that leverage AI and ML. Services that provide industry-leading protection against these attacks will focus on fast, accurate detection and bot blocking with limited drag on your network and applications.
Although many DDoS protection solutions consume a lot of bandwidth, the right solution will be cloud-based. DDoS protection like this enables bandwidth growth, allowing your website or application to use more server space as needed. A sudden influx of bots that would normally overwhelm your servers can be distributed across multiple servers if they are not blocked right away. This keeps your legitimate traffic flowing even as the DDoS issue is addressed.
Effective DDoS protection should cover your website, applications, and network. Any weak point is a potential attack vector, so you want to ensure that all layers that a DDoS attack might target are well-protected.
Traditional DDoS protection and security tools are effective and can help protect your systems from an attack, but increasingly evasive bots are becoming more difficult to block. This renders your protection tools less effective. To combat this, consider implementing DDoS protection solutions that leverage AI and ML to maximize their effectiveness.
