The Ultimate Guide to DDoS Attack - Things You Need to Know Now

DDoS attacks hit without any prior warning! Instead, they flood your resources, disrupt your online operations, and potentially damage your website’s reputation within a couple of minutes.

A majority of businesses undervalue how silently it damages your systems without prior warning. DDoS web hosting solutions offered by MilesWeb come with continuous threat monitoring and control to ensure guaranteed uptime.

Covering all the aspects from finding the best web hosting with DDoS protection to selecting the best DDoS hosting provider, everything will be explained in this thorough DDoS protection guide. By the end of this blog, you’ll understand the workings behind DDoS attacks, how to identify them, and how to protect your website with the best DDoS hosting solution. So, are you ready?

Table Of Content

What is a DDoS Attack?
The Anatomy of a DDoS Attack
What is the Motivation behind a DDoS Attack?
DDoS Attack: Key Stats and Insights 2025
Common Types of DDoS Attacks
Top 5 DDoS Protection Solutions
How MilesWeb’s Cloudbric Website Security Solution helps to mitigate the DDoS attack?
Other attacks blocked by Cloudbric are –
Tips for Fighting DDoS Attacks
FAQs

What is a DDoS Attack?

DDoS, i.e., distributed denial of service attack, is a deliberate attempt to interrupt the regular traffic of a targeted system, server, service, or network by flooding it with excessive traffic, completely slowing down or making the targeted systems completely inaccessible to authorized users.

DDoS attacks succeed in flooding the targeted systems by utilizing a network of hijacked devices ranging from conventional computer systems to networked devices like IoT systems.

If seen at a glance, it looks like an online traffic jam bringing regular traffic to a halt.

The Anatomy of a DDoS Attack

Usually, DDoS attacks are launched by using a network of interconnected infected devices across the Internet. Which comprises computers and other connected devices, like IoT systems. These computers are infested with malware, and their operation is taken over by remote attackers. Each one of these infected devices is known as a bot or zombie and together they are referred to as a botnet.

After establishing a botnet, the attacker sends remote instructions to the bots to flood the target. During the attack, a single bot sends fake requests to the target’s IP address, potentially flooding it, which denies access to the regular traffic. Since every bot appears as an authentic device, it is difficult to distinguish harmful traffic from valid requests.

What is the Motivation behind a DDoS Attack?

Attackers prime motivation behind the attack can be one of the below :

Business Conflicts – Businesses can use DDoS attacks for taking down the competitor websites during peak season or to avoid their participation in a certain event like Cyber Monday.
Ideology – The hacktivists use DDoS attacks for targeting the websites which doesn’t agree to their ideology.
Boredom – Some cyber vandals also known as “script-kiddies” use the prewritten scripts to launch DDoS attacks. The attack prepetrators are typically bored and can be the hackers that want to simply play a game on someone.
Cyber Warfare – The government uses DDoS attacks to cripple the opposition websites and also the infrastructure of the enemy’s country.
Extortion – DDoS attacks are also used as a means of extorting money from their targets.

DDoS Attack: Key Stats and Insights 2025

The European Cyber Report 2025 shows that there is a 137% annual increase in the number of DDoS attacks targeting the Link11 network as compared to the previous year. Specifically, these attacks are getting shorter but are becoming more refined and technically advanced, with two-thirds of attacks reaching their maximum intensity within just 10 to 60 seconds.
As per the latest Gcore’s Radar report, global DDoS incidents have spiked by 56% compared to the previous year. The gaming sector remains by far the most targeted sector, accounting for 34% of all attacks, with financial services close behind.
Radware’s Cyber Threat Report has documented a considerable growth in DDoS attacks in 2024, indicating a 550% growth compared to the past year. Telecom companies faced the majority of these attacks, nearly 43%, and the financial sector 30%.
Cloudflare was attacked by a record-high hyper-volumetric DDoS attack ever documented in 2024. It touched 5.6 Tbps (terabits per second) and 666 million PPS (packets per second) and lasted only for 80 seconds.
A huge DDoS attack using the HTTP/2 “Rapid Reset” hit Google in October 2023, hitting 398 million RPS (requests per second).

Common Types of DDoS Attacks

On a broader perspective, there are three types of DDoS attacks as below :

– Volume Based or Volumetric Attacks

The goal of this type of attack is to create saturation by consuming all the bandwidth available on the targeted site. The magnitude of attack is measured in bits per second (Bps).

– Protocol Attacks

Also termed as state-exhaustion attacks, the goal of protocol attacks is to cause disruption of a service by consuming the actual server resources or those of the intermediate communication tools like load balancers and firewalls. The magnitude is measured in packets per second (Pps).

– Application Layer Attacks

It is sometimes referred to as a layer 7 DDoS attack, the goal of these attacks is to exhaust the resources of the targets causing the web server to crash. The magnitude is measured in requests per second (Rps).

Below are some common types of DDoS attacks :

1. UDP Flood

The User Diagram Protocol (UDP), a sessionless networking protocol, floods random ports on a remote host. Therefore, the host repeatedly checks for the application listening at those ports and reports back with an ICMP packet. This process destroys the resources of the host, causing inaccessibility.

2. ICMP (Ping) Flood

In ICMP flood attack, the target resource is overwhelmed with ICMP Echo Request (ping) packets rapidly without waiting for the replies. In this type of attack, both outgoing and incoming bandwidth is consumed, since the server of victim will often attempt to respond with ICMP Echo Reply packets resulting in a significant complete system slowdown.

3. SYN Flood

The TCP connection sequence is exploited by the SYN flood attack that is known as three-way handshake. A synchronized (SYN) message is received on the host’s machine to start with the “handshake”. The request is acknowledged by the server by sending the acknowledgement (ACK) flag to the initial host and waits for the connection to be closed. The connection will get completed when the requesting machine will close the connection. In an SYN flood, spoofed requests are sent and server responds with an ACK packet to complete the TCP connection but the connection is allowed to timeout, instead of closing it. Therefore, the server resources get exhausted and the server goes offline.

4. Ping of Death

A denial of service attack wherein the attacker sends multiple malicious or malformed pings to a computer is called as Ping of Death attack. The maximum packet length of an IP packet is 65,535 bytes. In this attack, when the recipient follows malicious manipulation of fragment content, he/she ends up with an IP packet that is larger than 65,535 bytes when reassembled. Due to this, memory buffers allocated for the packet can overflow, causing denial of service for legitimate packets.

5. Slowloris

A highly targeted attack, Slowloris enables one web server to take down another server, without having an effect on other services or ports on the target network. This is done by holding maximum connections to the target web server open for as long as possible. The target machine will open with partial requests and is permitted to stay open for maximum time. HTTP headers will also be sent at certain intervals by the target machine. Due to this the requests will increase but won’t be complete – keeping them open for longer time until the target website isn’t able to stay online.

6. NTP Amplification

In NTP Amplification attack, the publically-accessible Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers are exploited to destroy a targeted server with UDP traffic. The attack is termed as an amplification assault due to the query-to-response ratio which is anywhere between 1:20 and 1:200 or more. From this scenario, one thing is for sure that any attacker obtaining the list of open NTP servers can easily produce a overwhelming high-bandwidth, high-volume denial of service attack.

7. HTTP Flood

In this attack, seemingly-legitimate HTTP GET or POST requests are exploited to attack a web application or server. No malformed pockets, reflection or spooking techniques are used by HTTP floods and need less bandwidth as compared to other attacks to bring down the targeted server or site. When the server or application is forced to assign maximum resources possible in response to each single request, the attack is highly effective at that time.

8. Zero-day DDoS Attack

Zero-day attacks are referred to those attacks that are completely new DDoS attack methods that exploit vulnerabilities which haven’t been patched yet. This term is popular among the hacker community members, since, the zero-day vulnerabilities trading practice has become a popular activity.

How MilesWeb’s Cloudbric Website Security Solution helps to mitigate the DDoS attack?

MilesWeb’s web hosting DDoS protection has partnered with Cloud Website Security Solutions, like Cloudbric, that help your website effectively mitigate every type of attack.

Cloudbric is the perfect solution for the users concerned about their website security that blocks the website attacks accurately and is also trusted by the industry leaders. When your website is secured with Cloudbric, it blocks the botnet traffic and stops the attack with its intelligent detection potential. It’s unfortunate that your website won’t be the victim of DDoS attack but to avoid your website being compromised its essential to add your website to Cloudbric.

The advanced DDoS solution of Cloudbric, protects your website against the most common one to complicated multi-vector and application layer attacks like Slowloris and R-U-Dead-Yet (RUDY).

Other attacks blocked by Cloudbric are –

TCP FIN Floods	TCP Syn Spoofed	HTTP Cache Control
TCP RST Floods	ICMP Floods	HTTP SSL Saturation
HTTP GET Floods	HTTP HEAD Floods	Amplified DNS DDoS
HTTP Post Floods	Brute Force	RUDY
HTTP XMLRPC PingBack attacks	TCP Ack Floods	Smurf
TCP Fragment attacks	Ping of Death	As well as other attack

Tips for Fighting DDoS Attacks

1. Early Identification of a DDoS Attack

When a server is monitored by you, it is important to identify when you would be under any attack. This is because as soon as you identify the attack was a DDoS attack, you will be able to start securing your website immediately.

For this, you need to have an idea about the typical inbound traffic profile on your website as the more familiar you are with your normal website traffic profile, the most easy it would be to spot when the profile changes. Since most DDoS attacks start with sharp spikes in traffic, it’s easy to detect the difference between a sudden rush of genuine visitors and the start of a DDoS attack.

It would be better to nominate a DDoS leader in your company who will be responsible for acting while your website is under attack.

2. Overprovision Bandwidth

It’s always good to have extra bandwidth available to your web server as compared to your regular bandwidth. This will help in accommodation of sudden and unexpected spikes in traffic which can result due a special offer, an advertising campaign or even mention of your company in the media.

Though having extra bandwidth won’t stop a DDoS attack, it may at least give you extra minutes to act prior to your resources get exhausted.

3. Defend at Network Perimeter

Some technical measures which can be taken to partially mitigate the attack’s effect – especially in first few minutes and also, some issues are quite simple to resolve. For example, when you run your won server, you can do the following :

Specify a limit your router to prevent your web server being inundated.
Add filters for helping your router to drop packets from evident attack sources.
Break half-open connections in a more aggressive manner.
Plunge malformed or spoofed packages.
Set SYN, ICMP and UDP flood drop thresholds at lower rate.

But today these steps aren’t quite effective as the DDoS attacks today are too large for these measures to have any major impact. One thing is for sure that you may get little time as a DDoS attack inclines.

4. Call Your Hosting Provider or ISP

You can always call your web host provider or ISP, if you are hosting your server and notify them about the DDoS attack. The ISP or the host provider may have already detected the attack, depending on the attack’s strength or they may themselves start to overcome the attack.

There’s a greater chance of DDoS attack when you are hosting your server as compared to running it yourself. The reason behind this is, the data center will have far higher bandwidth links and higher capacity routers in comparison to your company has itself and its staff will be expertise in dealing with attacks. When your server is located in a datacenter, the DDoS traffic won’t affect your corporate LAN and so that part of your business including email and voice over IP services will operate normally in the attack event.

When your website is attacked by a massive DDoS attack, the first thing an ISP or hosting solution with DDoS protection will do is “null route” your traffic. It will result in the dropping of packets meant for your web server before they arrive.

5. Contact the DDoS Support Specialist

When the attack is large, it’s better to call a specialist DDoS mitigation company for keeping your website live. Their large scale infrastructure and varied technologies like data scrubbing, helps to keep your website online. You can contact the DDoS mitigation company directly or your web hosting provider or ISP may have a signed an agreement with one of them to tackle big attacks.

DDoS mitigation services aren’t free and so it depends on you that you want to pay to stay online or take risk of the attack. It may cost few hundred dollars a month to subscribe to a DDoS mitigation service on an ongoing basis.

6. A DDoS Playbook Creation

Creating a playbook, documenting every step of a pre-planned response to a DDoS attack in details, when it’s detected is one of the best ways to quickly and effectively react to a DDoS attack.

This playbook should include the actions in details, with contact names and numbers of all those who may require to be brought in action as a part of the playbook’s plan. DDoS mitigation companies can assist in creating a playbook by operating a fake DDoS attack which will enable you to develop and filter a fast corporate practice for dealing with a real attack.

Conclusion

Comprehending DDoS attacks is no longer a privilege but a requirement for companies in the modern digital age. With malicious threats becoming more advanced every day, remaining aware and adopting secure defense mechanisms is important to protecting your network. No defense is completely foolproof, but investing money into real-time monitoring, threat detection, as well as mitigation and DDoS protection now will keep you ahead of the attackers. Give yourself the skills and the required web hosting DDoS protection software to protect your organization, because in the fight against DDoS attacks, awareness is the first line of defense.

FAQs

Which platforms are most commonly targeted by DDoS attacks?

Websites, online services, network infrastructure, gaming platforms, and financial firms are most commonly targeted by DDoS attacks.

How can website owners protect their websites from DDoS attacks using hosting solutions with DDoS protection?

By selecting the best hosting solutions with DDoS protection, website and business owners can easily mitigate DDoS attacks. Because these DDoS web hosting solutions typically contain traffic filtering tools, continuous monitoring, automatic threat response, and flexible solutions to effectively handle huge traffic surges by maintaining uptime and consistent performance even at the time of attacks.

How to mitigate a DDoS attack?

To successfully defend against a DDoS attack, it is necessary to select one of the best DDoS hosting solutions, integrate a web application firewall (WAF), continuously monitor website traffic, and also deploy a content delivery network (CDN) to efficiently manage high traffic volumes.

What is the importance of a network infrastructure in enabling or defending against DDoS attacks?

Network infrastructure can act as a line of defense or a point of failure in case of DDoS attacks. An outdated network architecture can be easily flooded with fake requests, whereas a solid, appropriately set up infrastructure with load balancers, advanced firewalls, and the best DDoS hosting solutions can effectively address DDoS attacks without interrupting website operations.

Do You Really Know Everything About The DDoS Attack?