How DDoS Attacks Are Different for Service Providers

Service providers – Enabling Services

In the hectic digital race service providers are associated with many roles, consulting, communications, storage, processing, hosting, broadband, streaming and more but the essence of service providers is very simple – enabling services.

To do so, evolution and revolution are done simultaneously, evolution by shifting to cloud environments and the revolution by transforming wireless networks to 5G and its virtualized and distributed approach.  

As a result, infrastructure transformation has placed new cybersecurity vulnerabilities on service providers at a time when the world is becoming increasingly insecure.

Why DDoS Attacks Are Different for Service Providers

Most of us believe that in order to be a hacker you need to acquire special skills and abilities, we all see how movies and TV shows are labeling hackers as geniuses, and only those special few can understand cyber-attacks.

In reality, almost anyone can initiate a cyber-attack, even a large-scale DDoS attack using Botnets is easily done. All you need is a target and financial capabilities, once you have those two you are inches from purchasing a sophisticated large-scale attack.

The business of DDoS-as-a service is blooming. New groups like “Fancy Lazarus” allow anyone to perform devastating attacks with just a few clicks. DDoS subscriptions range from few US dollars per month and up to thousands of dollars per month for initiating large scale attacks. as a result, it’s no surprise Radware’s research team could see DDoS extortions as a persistent part of the DDoS threat landscape in all verticals since August of 2020 (Ransom DDoS Update: The Hunt for Unprotected Assets,” June 11, 2021).

Most enterprises do not orchestrate large scale distributed networks and they are focused on their own limited applications and services, service providers on the other hand are operating a more diverse ecosystem, large-scale infrastructure, and they also have to take care of their customers networks and services. Attackers must invest a lot of processing power and sophistication to affect service providers, therefore service providers are more exposed to extra-large globally distributed attacks that can overwhelm their fixed infrastructure.

Be Prepared for Anything!

Protecting Service provider’s large-scale network is different, most service providers will implement a DDoS protection solution only after verifying it has an industry leading detection and mitigation, flexible deployment options, orchestration ability at distributed large-Scale networks and adequate support and SLA. What service providers usually lack is the ability to mitigate extra-large globally distributed attacks that can overwhelm their infrastructure.

Service providers are using an on-premise DDoS mitigation solution, the deployment consist usually with a small capacity inline DDOS mitigation appliance as a first line of defense, and as a second line of defense an out of path local scrubbing center to mitigate larger scale attacks. Sadly, this is not enough, according to Radware quarterly DDoS attack report, DDoS attacks volumes are only increasing in size. furthermore, according to Radware research team recently service providers are targeted by large-scale RDDoS attacks that they are not prepared for (Ransom DDoS Update: The Hunt for Unprotected Assets, June 11, 2021).

[Like this post? Subscribe now to get the latest Radware content in your inbox weekly plus exclusive access to Radware’s Premium Content.]

Large globally distributed attacks are targeting DNS services and can overwhelm any internet uplinks, once the uplink is saturated customers and partners are left without available service. The result is bad PR, broken trust, and a direct and indirect unnecessary cost (professional services, customers refund etc.).

The service providers which were able to contain the large-scale attacks were protected with a cloud DDoS protection service leveraging high volume mitigation capacity with global presence to support their existing on-premise protection. Once diverting the traffic to the Cloud DDoS protection service the attack is fully mitigated with no service impact.

Those without cloud DDoS protection suffered from access and services outages until invoking costly emergency operational services.

[You may also like: How Cloud Native Technology will Impact 5G Mobile Networks]

Service providers are not immune

No network size is immune to cyber-attack and if your applications and network are not adequately protected, cybercriminals will be able to disrupt access and cause significant damage to your reputation.

Be sure your on premise DDoS protection service can leverage a capable global cloud scrubbing center to withstand any size of Attack.

When working with a hybrid protection you are protecting your network from any possible threats, cloud DDOS protection services must integrate to the on premise solution, having a single vendor solution can enhance the mitigation and simplify the support or emergency professional services assistance.