March 22, 2024 at 09:54AM
CISA, FBI, and MS-ISAC have issued updated joint guidance on defending against DoS and DDoS attacks. The guidance categorizes attacks, provides mitigation recommendations, and outlines differences between DoS and DDoS attacks. Organizations are advised to conduct risk assessments, implement network monitoring, and activate incident response plans to minimize potential damage from DDoS attacks.
Meeting Notes Summary:
The US cybersecurity agency CISA, the FBI, and the MS-ISAC have jointly released updated guidance on defending against denial-of-service (DoS) and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The guidance categorizes DDoS attacks into three types, provides technical definitions, and offers mitigation recommendations.
DoS and DDoS attacks aim to disrupt the availability of the target, with the critical difference being the source of the attack. DoS attacks use a single traffic source, while DDoS attacks utilize multiple sources, often compromised devices in a botnet. DDoS attacks generate higher traffic volumes and can exhaust target resources to a greater extent, often using techniques like IP spoofing.
Both DoS and DDoS attacks can be volumetric, protocol-based, or application layer. The guidance recommends conducting risk assessments, implementing network monitoring tools, analyzing traffic, using Captcha and an incident response plan, evaluating bandwidth capacity, load balancing, configuring firewalls, updating and patching systems, conducting web application assessments, backing up critical data, employee education, and developing communication plans.
Signs of an ongoing DDoS attack include unavailable sites or services, increased network traffic, unusual traffic patterns, server crashes, increased resource consumption, surge in spam, communication disruptions, and notifications from DDoS protection services. Responding organizations should activate incident response plans, notify ISPs or hosting providers, collect evidence, implement traffic filtering, enable DDoS mitigation services, scale up resources, and maintain communication with internal teams and external stakeholders.
The guide also provides post-attack recommendations and advises reporting incidents to CISA, the FBI, or MS-ISAC. Additionally, the guide was authored in collaboration with Akamai, Cloudflare, and Google.
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