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October 29, 2018It’s hard to imagine a modern business taking place anywhere else but online. Most companies, organizations, and professionals directly depend on the performance of their websites, and any kind of security issue can cause catastrophic consequences.
DDoS attacks are becoming one of the major safety threats. Their number is constantly on the rise, as is the number of long-duration attacks. At the same time, the average size of DDoS attacks is increasing steadily and approaching 1 Gbps, which is enough to take most organizations completely offline.
What does it mean for you as a webmaster? Well, the answer is obvious – you need to do everything it takes to prevent DDoS attacks. We will show you how to do it in this post.
DDoS Attacks Explained
Before we reveal the top 10 anti-DDoS tools, we must explain to you how they work in the first place. As defined by TechTarget, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is an attack in which multiple compromised computer systems attack a target, such as a server, website or other network resources, and cause a denial of service for users of the targeted resource. https://www.youtube.com/embed/OhA9PAfkJ10The fact that the incoming traffic comes from so many different sources is making it much harder to halt the attack by blacklisting one IP address. There are three types of DDoS attacks – traffic, bandwidth, and application attacks – but each comes with a purpose to create a smokescreen for other fraudulent actions.
In general, webmasters can protect their sites by doing the following:
- Buy a dedicated server to ensure more bandwidth and security
- Update regularly to keep the content management system, plugins, and other tools safe and stable
- Create blacklists to ban suspicious IP addresses
- Train staff to recognize DDoS attacks and react quickly
The Best Anti-DDoS Tools
Editor’s note: The below is the sole opinion of the guest author and does not reflect Colocation America’s opinion.
With all of that being said, we have to emphasize the fact that anti-DDoS tools still remain the single most effective way to prevent attacks. There are hundreds of available options at your disposal, but we want to point out solutions that already proved to be highly reliable. Here are the top 10 picks:
Incapsula
Incapsula is a popular anti-DDoS tool that solves attacks within seconds. No matter how big or small your system might be, this software will solve the problem without stopping the regular website traffic. The process is completely automated, while its reliability is unprecedented – Incapsula has a huge scrubbing capacity, which allows it to handle over 60 billion attacks per second.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is an authoritative DDoS fighter with the broad scope of protection mechanisms. The tool mitigates attacks, thus allowing your website to function normally. With Cloudflare, you can maintain full-capacity and availability regardless of the strength of the attack.
Its Shared Network Intelligence enables software network to become smarter over time, making it easier to notice and eliminate new threats. If you are running a small website or a blog, you can even use the basic Cloudflare features free of charge.
Cloudbric
Cloudbric offers you an advanced solution for DDoS attacks. The best thing about this tool is that it successfully solves both the common and sophisticated security threats, detecting dozens of different DDoS systems.
Arbor DDoS
Arbor DDoS is a specialized service that utilizes the so-called intelligently automated DDoS attack protection products. The purpose of this software is mostly to protect larger systems such as enterprises, telecommunication service providers, or web hosting services.
Arbor DDoS can deal with up to 140 Tbps of attack traffic without disrupting the regular traffic. It puts an extra emphasis on mobile protection, thus improving the overall quality of network infrastructure and applications.
Bee Think
Bee Think is DDoS protection software for Windows Servers. The platform provides clients with a full range of features, including:
- Real-time monitoring
- Client bandwidth controlling and network flow surveillance
- Blacklisting
- TCP half-open connection management
- Automatic updates
- UDP connection rate and UDP packet rate control
AWS Shield
If you want to protect applications running on AWS, this is the right anti-DDoS tool for you. AWS Shield reduces DDoS risks to the minimum, protecting you from the most common types of attacks. However, you can opt for the more advanced level of protection.
SiteLock
SiteLock is another platform that offers clients automatic mitigation for DDoS attacks. The tool is extremely accurate, so it leaves 99% of your legitimate traffic unaffected.
Century Link
Century Link uses BGP Flowspec to mitigate DDoS threats. The platform has 4.5 Tbps of attack ingestion capacity, flowed by the real-time attack and peacetime reporting. Century Link offers you advanced behavioral analytics technology and threat intelligence, as well as emergency and customer-initiated mitigation using BGP route control.
Stormwall PRO
Stormwall PRO is using state-of-the-art protection system to ensure stable functioning of your website. It can handle even the most powerful DDoS attacks, preventing illegitimate traffic from packet generators.
F5 Networks
F5 Networks gives you a reliable DDoS protection by detecting and preventing a wider range of attacks. The tool is not focusing on common DDoS threats only, but it also provides clients with multi-layered defense. That way, it can protect you against blended network attacks and sophisticated application attacks.
Conclusion
DDoS attacks can paralyze your website, ruin your online reputation, and jeopardize the whole business. For this reason, it is crucial to eliminate this threat and embrace state of the art protection models. Our post showed you 10 tools to prevent DDoS attacks. Don’t forget to check them out and choose the most suitable option for your site – it could save your business someday!