- [Instructor] Although botnets and distributed denial
of service, or DDoS attacks may be growing threats
on the cyber security threat landscape,
there are effective ways to minimize your exposure to them.
In this video, I'll cover how to protect against botnet
and DDoS attacks and how
to keep your systems from becoming part of a botnet.
We'll start by talking about five ways
to protect your websites
and online applications from DDoS attacks.
First, you absolutely must have either firewalls
or web application firewalls
or WAFs for short in front of your websites.
Firewalls and WAFs can be used to detect
and block unwanted and abnormal traffic.
They can also be used to control
or throttle the traffic that reaches your applications.
Firewalls and WAFs though
can still be overwhelmed by DDoS attacks.
The second way you can protect against DDoS attacks
is by using load balancers
or content delivery networks or CDNs for short.
Load balancers and CDNs can share
the traffic load across servers in different locations,
which waters down the DDoS attack.
Third, consider using DDoS defense systems
or service providers that specialize in protecting
organizations from these attacks.
CloudFlare for instance provides a service
that can absorb DDoS traffic
and route only legitimate traffic to your web servers.
Next, a good network monitoring system
will detect unusual internet traffic
like a DDoS attack once it starts.
Notifications from a network monitoring system will give
you an early warning about the attack,
so you can respond quickly.
And finally, develop a denial of service response plan.
Define who will be on the response team in the event
of a DDoS attack, and write down the procedures
that must be followed in the event of an attack.
When you have these protections in place,
you can hire a qualified third-party firm
to conduct a DDoS test.
There are many security companies
that specialize in pretend DDoS attacks,
load tests, and other external threat simulations.
They can help identify system misconfigurations,
network bottlenecks, poor instant response, and more.
Now let's talk about how
to keep your systems from joining a botnet.
Since the primary way systems are taken over
and added to botnets is through the use of malware,
the best way to protect your systems
is by using effective anti-malware.
Make sure you're using the latest version
with the most current malware definitions.
Next, you should monitor your system processes,
investigating any that look unusual
or take excessive CPU or memory.
These can be signs that your system is part of a botnet,
and of course follow good enterprise security practices.
Example practices include,
make sure all your devices have strong passwords,
keep software, firmware,
and applications updated and patched.
Implement anti-spam controls on your email server.
Use web filtering to block access to sites
that commonly host malware,
and conduct regular user security awareness training
and phishing training.
These may seem like basic security tasks,
but they'll go a long way toward protecting your systems
from becoming part of a botnet.
Botnets and DDoS attacks are getting bigger and more common.
And like an arms race, their attack methods
are getting more creative
and evolving to overcome existing defense measures.
Take the steps I covered in this video
to protect your organization's data
from botnet and DDoS threats.