Record-breaking DDoS attacks, generating about 398 million requests per second at peak.
Throughout the months of August and September, major Cloud Service Providers (CSP) were hit by a series of massive, record-breaking DDoS attacks, generating about 398 million requests per second at peak. Previously the record was held at a comparatively meager 46 million requests per second. Known as the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attacks, the scale of these attacks was so massive at its peak that according to Google, it generated more requests in two minutes than Wikipedia received in the entirety of September. That’s enough to bring down any legacy enterprise, regardless of the scale of its datacenter.
DDoS attacks have exited pretty much since the inception of the internet, However, the techniques, motives, and scale have evolved. While previously the sole purpose was disrupting content or service availability, now the motives have become more nefarious to include hacktivist agendas and ransom extortion.
Giants like Google and AWs were able to detect and mitigate the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attacks, thanks to their monumental investments in DDoS protection, global scale, and edge capacity. They had the capacity to absorb the huge number of requests and take the impact without passing consequences off to their customers. As CSPs continue to strengthen and improve their DDoS defense capabilities with time and experience, some 92% of organizations that do not rely on any one of these cloud providers exclusively may find themselves in a conundrum. The pressing question being, can multi-cloud become a liability during large-scale DDoS?
Getting straight to the point, multi-cloud is a successful DDoS mitigation strategy in and of itself. It offers the redundancy, geographical distribution, and scalability needed to thwart sophisticated DDoS attacks. The ability to shift operations to another unimpacted CSP can limit the resulting downtime and consequences. However, you need real-time insights to proactively detect a DDoS as well as cross-cloud failover and load-balancing mechanisms to automatically redirect traffic to unaffected CSP.
To put it simply, multi-cloud visibility and integration are paramount for enacting DDoS defense spanning across multiple clouds. Without them, managing DDoS in complicated multi-cloud environments is a lost battle.
Multiple cloud providers and interconnected services mean malicious actors get a broader attack surface to exploit.
Multi-cloud environments are composed of various clouds, networks, gateways, and load balancers. Attacks can target any resource in any environment, making it difficult to identify and mitigate DDoS traffic.
Different CSPs have different logging and monitoring solutions. Aggregating and analyzing data from disparate tools is complicated, time-consuming and can lead to visibility gaps.
Different CSPs also have different built-in DDoS defense capabilities, tailored to their own infrastructure and services. This diverse defense ecosystem can result in vulnerabilities, blindspots, and integration challenges.
Lack of coordination Implementing consistent and coordinated DDoS mitigation strategies across a diverse cloud portfolio can result in inconsistencies and inefficiencies in incident response.
Like most multi-cloud benefits, DDoS defense and management depends entirely on how you manage and orchestrate your multi-cloud deployments.
The emma Platform for Coordinated Multi-cloud DDoS Management
emma is a unified, no-code cloud management platform that spans all cloud providers and on-premise environments. Here’s how the emma platform’s single interface, powerful analytics, and no-code approach simplifies comprehensive DDoS management across hybrid and multi-cloud environments:
The emma platform’s centralized dashboard provides deep visibility into the entire multi-cloud ecosystem, allowing you to track all services, projects, and infrastructure components. Thanks to a familiar dashboard, you can quickly spot resource overruns and set consumption limitations centrally across all cloud environments for proactive DDoS defense.
The emma platform’s ML engine analyzes and summarizes resource usage across cloud platforms, highlighting any anomalies in resource consumption, traffic patterns and network performance. This can help in establishing if specific resources or cloud instances need to be scaled up or moved to a different cloud.
The emma platform’s no-code approach to deployment, management, and monitoring of VMs and cloud instances across clouds abstracts complex multi-cloud integrations and allows you to transfer VMs and data between different CSPs and regions in just a few clicks. This means, if DDoS traffic manages to overwhelm one cloud environment, you can seamlessly shift to another and maintain service availability and operational continuity.
The emma platform’s single-pane-of-glass view allows you to aggregate and analyze logs from disparate cloud environments, simplifying the task of monitoring cross-cloud traffic patterns and enforcing consistent rate limiting and security policies across all environments.
The emma platform integrates seamlessly with major security vendors. For comprehensive DDoS defense, you can tap into advanced DDoS protection capabilities from leading security service providers like CheckPoint and Fortinet. The emma platform’s unified management dashboard ensures that disparate security tools do not add to the complexity of your tech stack, and you can centrally deploy DDoS defense capabilities across all environments.
There’s no denying that DDoS attacks are becoming more frequent, powerful, and sophisticated. Just in the first quarter of 2023, we’ve witnessed a 6% quarter over quarter increase in 100 Gbps or more DDoS attacks. The growth rate is a whopping 126% for moderately powerful (10-100 Gbps) DDoS attacks. Adding to the threat is an increasingly complex and siloed cloud environment, enabling attackers to unleash and orchestrate much more devastating DDoS attacks. The threat landscape underscores a need for centralized monitoring and management along with an all-encompassing DDoS defense and management strategy. CSPs are already bracing themselves for the next wave of DDoS. And while they do, how prepared are you?
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