When it comes to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, it’s imperative to rely on timely and actionable threat intelligence, now a must-have to combat today’s DDoS attack methods. That’s largely because modern DDoS attacks are not what they once were even a couple of years ago. Today’s attacks are carefully choreographed by bad actors who can rapidly identify weaknesses, tailor attacks and make adjustments based on new attack vectors they choose to exploit. This is also why real-time visibility is critical to secure enterprises across the digital ecosystem.

For the best example of why DDoS defenses must change, look no further than the meticulously planned DDoS attacks against governmental entities. To mitigate these “adaptive DDoS” attacks, security teams should consider a defense strategy that goes beyond a traditional defense solution. They also need to rely more on analyst experience to validate attacker exploits and how to remediate them.

Using the NATO example, countries like Poland have unfortunately been driving geopolitically focused DDoS attacks, as changes in political leadership are often moments in time that bad actors use to engineer new attacks. Just this winter in Poland, DDoS attack volume increased by 4x within days of its new government being sworn into office. Often, this is the outcome of hacktivist groups (Killnet, Noname057 and Anonymous Sudan, among others) standing in opposition to newly elected officials.

Attacks against governments are just one example of DDoS attackers becoming more adept at creating new attacks. Businesses in numerous sectors are also impacted at alarming rates. This is why threat intelligence needs to be taken more seriously and enterprises must understand the value of adaptive DDoS defenses as part of an overarching security posture.

Adaptive DDoS Attacks Vs. Adaptive DDoS Defenses

In an adaptive DDoS attack, bad actors carefully orchestrate entire campaigns involving reconnaissance. These campaigns identify weaknesses, tailor attacks and monitor attack performance in real-time for efficacy, followed by adjustments in attack vectors. Organizations need to consider implementing an adaptive DDoS protection strategy to remediate such attacks better.

An adaptive DDoS protection approach combines intelligent machine learning algorithms with dynamically updated, actionable DDoS threat intelligence. When taking a more adaptive strategy, organizations can execute real-time traffic analysis using artificial intelligence to inspect and analyze traffic with deeper granularity than was previously possible. These solutions can also detect zero-minute attacks and changes to attack vectors. Once an attack is detected and classified, solutions of this nature automatically understand the optimal mitigation methods that can be used to surgically and rapidly block the specific attack.

The Value of Threat Intelligence to Combat New DDoS Attacks

Real-time threat intelligence’s role in an actual DDoS defense strategy can no longer be understated. Today, threat intelligence solutions exist for businesses to use machine learning (ML) from rich data lakes of known DDoS attack vectors, sources and behavioral patterns. Here’s how it works.

Data is continuously fed into detection platforms through an intelligence feed to aid in detecting most DDoS attacks. This type of intelligence acts as an early warning system to enable mitigation. When enterprises consider taking this approach to threat intelligence as part of their adaptive DDoS defense strategy, it can block as much as 80-90% of attack traffic. These solutions can also detect zero-minute attacks and changes to attack vectors. Once an attack is detected and classified, the solution understands how to remediate and selectively block a specific attack.

Furthermore, adaptive DDoS defenses can identify changing attack vectors by constantly evaluating attack traffic in real-time. This analysis is continuously updated as characteristics of the attack traffic change. The value in having better visibility tools with actionable threat intelligence and AI to automatically remediate attack vectors is a key method of adapting while DDoS attackers also evolve.

As DDoS attackers become more sophisticated and the attack surface grows exponentially, businesses must expand beyond an ideology of prevention to include a focus on early detection and response combining both human and technological facets of the security ecosystem to be truly effective. It is a never-ending battle; sometimes the bad actors win and gain access to networks. The true value of an adaptive DDoS is having the intelligence to instantly detect, investigate and remediate suspicious behavior, as quickly as possible.