Defending Against the Most Common Azure DDoS Attacks: A Beginner's Guide

As organizations increasingly migrate their applications to the cloud, they face a growing threat from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks aim to exhaust an application's resources, making it unavailable to legitimate users. Azure DDoS Protection, combined with best practices in application design, provides enhanced mitigation features to defend against DDoS attacks targeting Azure resources in a virtual network.

Understanding the Most Common Azure DDoS Attack Types

Azure DDoS Protection can mitigate the following types of attacks:

1. Volumetric attacks: These attacks flood the network layer with a substantial amount of seemingly legitimate traffic, including UDP floods, amplification floods, and other spoofed-packet floods. Azure's global network scale and scrubbing capabilities automatically absorb and mitigate these multi-gigabyte attacks.

2. Protocol attacks: These attacks exploit weaknesses in the layer 3 and layer 4 protocol stack, rendering the target inaccessible. Examples include SYN flood attacks and reflection attacks. DDoS Protection mitigates these attacks by differentiating between malicious and legitimate traffic and blocking the malicious traffic.

3. Resource (application) layer attacks: These attacks target web application packets, disrupting the transmission of data between hosts. They include HTTP protocol violations, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting. To defend against these layer 7 attacks, use a web application firewall (WAF) in addition to DDoS Protection.

Enabling Azure DDoS Protection

Azure DDoS Protection offers two service tiers: Basic and Standard. The Basic tier is enabled by default at no additional charge and mitigates common network attacks. The Standard tier provides advanced capabilities, including logging, alerting, telemetry, and customizable mitigation policies.

To enable DDoS Protection, follow these steps:

1. Create a DDoS Protection Plan in your desired subscription.

2. Link the plan to a virtual network where you want to enable protection.

3. Configure alerts and telemetry to monitor for DDoS attacks.

Key Features of Azure DDoS Protection

Azure DDoS Protection offers several key features to help defend against DDoS attacks:

• Always-on traffic monitoring: Your application traffic patterns are monitored 24/7 for indicators of DDoS attacks.

• Adaptive real-time tuning: Intelligent traffic profiling learns your application's traffic over time and selects the most suitable mitigation profile, adjusting as traffic changes.

• Attack analytics, metrics, and alerting: Detailed reports, summarized metrics, and configurable alerts provide insights into active attacks.

• DDoS rapid response: During an active attack, customers have access to the DDoS Rapid Response team for attack investigation and post-attack analysis.

By understanding the most common Azure DDoS attack types and leveraging the features of Azure DDoS Protection, organizations can enhance the availability and reliability of their cloud-based applications, mitigating the risks posed by DDoS attacks.