DDoS Stress Testing with CERTAINITY

In today’s interconnected digital world, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks have become an increasing threat to organizations of every size. By disrupting online services and critical systems, these attacks can jeopardize supply chains, interrupt business operations, or even undermine an organization’s entire business model. The resulting operational and financial impact can be significant, leaving organizations both vulnerable and susceptible to extortion.

What Is a DDoS Attack?

A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is a type of cyber attack in which an attacker attempts to disrupt or completely disable an online service, website, or network by overwhelming it with an enormous volume of requests originating from multiple sources simultaneously. The objective is to degrade performance, interrupt normal operations, or make the targeted service entirely unavailable.

Unlike a traditional Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack, which originates from a single source, a DDoS attack leverages a large number of compromised internet-connected devices. These devices are typically infected with malware and combined into a botnet. In most cases, the owners of these compromised systems are unaware that their devices are being used to participate in cyber attacks.

DDoS attacks can take many different forms depending on the techniques used. The most common attack categories include:

1. Volumetric Attacks: These attacks attempt to exhaust the target’s available bandwidth by flooding it with massive amounts of network traffic.
2. Protocol Attacks: These attacks exploit weaknesses in network or communication protocols to consume server or networking resources.
3. Application Layer Attacks: These attacks target web applications and APIs by exploiting application-specific vulnerabilities or overwhelming application processes with seemingly legitimate requests.

Defending against DDoS attacks can be complex and typically requires a combination of technical and organizational measures. The foundation is a resilient network architecture with sufficient capacity, redundancy, and scalable resources. Building on that foundation, dedicated DDoS protection technologies - such as Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), load balancers, and other specialized security solutions - can significantly improve resilience. For maximum protection, organizations should also work closely with external DDoS mitigation providers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to establish effective attack detection and mitigation mechanisms, such as traffic diversion and traffic scrubbing.

Why Conduct a DDoS Stress Test?

A CERTAINITY DDoS Stress Test simulates a realistic DDoS attack against your IT infrastructure under controlled conditions. This allows organizations to evaluate how well their systems would withstand an actual attack and identify opportunities for improvement before a real incident occurs.

The benefits of conducting a DDoS stress test include:

Validation of Existing Protection Measures: Even expensive DDoS protection solutions can become ineffective if they are incorrectly configured or insufficiently tuned. A realistic DDoS stress test enables security teams to validate configurations, optimize protection mechanisms, and ensure that all available security features perform as intended under attack conditions.

Performance Verification: DDoS stress testing provides objective evidence of the effectiveness of DDoS protection solutions and ISP mitigation services. This is particularly valuable during proof-of-concept or pilot phases, allowing organizations to verify vendor claims and evaluate competing solutions before making procurement decisions.

Resilience Assessment and Benchmarking: Measure your organization’s resilience against realistic DDoS attacks, compare your current level of protection with your individual threat profile, and identify potential security gaps before attackers do.

Regulatory Compliance: Regulations such as NIS2 and DORA aim to strengthen the cyber resilience of organizations across Europe. In addition to implementing appropriate security controls to mitigate cyber risks, these regulations also require organizations to validate the effectiveness of those controls. When it comes to DDoS resilience, there is no practical substitute for realistic DDoS stress testing. The exact requirements depend on the organization’s industry, size, and regulatory obligations.

Identifying Weaknesses: Configuration errors and architectural single points of failure can significantly increase an organization’s exposure to DDoS attacks. A DDoS stress test proactively uncovers these weaknesses, enabling organizations to eliminate vulnerabilities before they can be exploited and substantially improve their resilience.

Blue Team Training: During the simulation, the organization’s IT security team (Blue Team) responds to a realistic attack scenario under controlled conditions. This provides an opportunity to validate incident response procedures, emergency processes, and operational playbooks. Based on the findings, response plans can be refined and optimized.

Assessing the Overall Impact: A DDoS attack rarely affects only the targeted system. Other applications, services, or infrastructure components may also experience unexpected degradation or outages. The overall impact on the technical environment is often difficult to predict. A DDoS stress test helps identify these dependencies and reveals potential cascading effects before they occur in production.

Our Approach and Assessment Methodology

CERTAINITY evaluates DDoS resilience using the internationally recognized DDoS Resiliency Score (DRS). The DRS measures how effectively a network or web infrastructure can withstand, absorb, and recover from a DDoS attack.

The DRS framework defines seven levels of DDoS attacks. Each level introduces increasingly sophisticated attack techniques, more targeted attack patterns, and higher traffic volumes. As the threat level increases, so do the defensive requirements, demanding faster detection, more advanced mitigation capabilities, and increasingly sophisticated response mechanisms.

The following table provides an overview of the key characteristics of each DDoS attack level:

Source: https://www.ddosresiliencyscore.org/