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Distributed Denial of Service attacks can damage your business—and they can be difficult to manage or counter. While there are a number of tools available to counter DDoS attacks, particularly in the commercial space, and there are a number of widely available DDoS protection services, sometimes it’s useful to know how to counter a DDoS on your own. One option is to absorb attacks across a broader set of inbound nodes. Let’s use the network below to illustrate (though often the scale needs to be quite a bit larger for this solution to be useful in the real world).

Assume, for the moment, that the attacker is injecting a DDoS stream from the black hat, sitting just behind AS65004. There are customers located in AS65001, 2, 3, 4, and 5. For whatever reason, the majority of the attacker’s traffic is coming in to site C, through AS65003. Normally this is a result of an anycast based service (such as active-active data centers, or a web based service, or a DNS service), combined with roughly geographical traffic patterns. Even a DDoS attack from a mid sized or large’ish botnet, or reflection off a set of DNS servers, can end up being Continue reading