Protecting Against the Rising Tide of Mega DDoS Attacks
DDoS threats are skyrocketing – with attack sizes doubling yearly. As these dangerous floods threaten to overwhelm networks, innovative architectures like anycast routing provide a lifeline.
This powerful technology soaks up massive traffic floods by dispersing them globally across interlinked scrubbing centers. Much like vessels in a hurricane drawing waves away from the coastline, anycast absorbs the impact of DDoS campaigns while keeping your applications floating safely.
In this guide, we‘ll pull back the curtain on the inner workings of anycast routing. You’ll discover what makes anycast so uniquely capable of handling deluges of malicious traffic without fluttering an eye.
We’ll also explore expert strategies for maximizing anycast capabilities based on over a decade of experience building resilient anti-DDoS networks.
Let‘s dive in and uncover why advanced CDNs and enterprises are increasingly relying on anycast as attacks rage on.
I. The Rising Tide of Mega DDoS Attacks
Before covering how anycast routing defends against DDoS barrages, it‘s important to quantify the scale of the threat landscape:
8.5 Tbps – That‘s the size of the largest DDoS attack on record, which targeted an American hosting provider in 2020 via a new vector involving reflecting traffic from unsecured servers.
To put that in perspective – 8.5 Tbps is over 80x times greater network capacity than required to congest typical network pipes. It’s equivalent to 80 million home broadband connections flooding a single provider simultaneously.
Even scarier – the average DDoS attack size doubles YoY. We’re seeing a dangerous arms race towards terabit-scale threats. Most networks stand little chance as these turn into tsunamis.
The motives behind DDoS attacks have also expanded recently. Traditional ideological hacktivism or personal grudges have given way more towards profit-driven cybercrime. Attackers often extort money from victims by threatening disruption to business operations.
As these attacks explode in scale and sophistication, it‘s shaken confidence in existing security models overly reliant on perimeter firewalls and simple scrubbing to fend off modern attacks.
In response, innovative architectures like anycast routing have emerged to radically reshape how networks withstand DDoS storms in the 2020s internet threat climate.
II. Dissecting The Anycast Routing Architecture
Anycast provides geo-distributed defenses by assigning the same IP address to multiple scrubbing centers or "nodes" dispersed across data centers worldwide. Here‘s a high-level view of how it works:
BGP Route Advertisements
Nodes within an anycast network use a dynamic routing protocol called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to broadcast the shared IP route to nearby internet routers worldwide.
Trafflic Steering via Latency Metrics
When requests from users arrive for the anycast IP, routers calculate latency and path metrics to determine optimal nodes. Requests get forwarded on to the nearest PoP based on this data.
Threshold-based Traffic Rebalancing
As any node gets saturated locally with extreme traffic floods, built-in mechanisms automatically shift flows away towards backup nodes less congested.
Integrated Threat Detection
PoPs within anycast configurations also filter incoming connections against lists of known attack signatures and heuristics to block bad traffic.
By spreading capacity globally, anycast can withstand localized attacks in specific regions that would easily overwhelm traditional, centralized defenses. Nodes also collectively share threat intelligence.
III. The Hard Numbers Behind the DDoS Explosion
Let‘s explore statistics quantifying the soaring DDoS threat landscape:
1.7 million – DDoS weapons spotted in 2020 more than doubling vs 2019 as insecure IoT devices proliferate. These botnets fuel larger attacks.
44% – The YoY increase in average DDoS attack sizes from 2019-2020 according to Nexusguard. Terabit-scale attacks on the horizon.
320 Gbps – The average attack bandwidth, equivalent to the entire network capacity of over 60 typical corporate headquarters locations combined.
82% – Of service providers reported suffering volumetric floods exceeding 1 Gbps. This highlights the need for anycast‘s scale.
With attacks exponentially growing, most networks are sinking – struggling to stay afloat amidst today‘s extreme threat climate. Anycast routing provides a lifeboat enabling organizations to stay aligned and safely ride out the storm.
IV. Analyzing Anycast Network Architectures In-Depth
Now that we‘ve quantified today‘s hazardous DDoS climate, let‘s explore what makes anycast routing so capable of confronting these threats:
- Collective Capacity
Anycast networks act as globally crowdsourced defenses – gaining strength as nodes added. Instead of targeting infrastructure in one location, attacks dissipate against the collective soak capacity worldwide.
- Redundancy Eliminates Single Points of Failure
Localized attacks aiming to take down data centers in one region can‘t achieve their goal with anycast because traffic instantly fails over to alternate nodes in other areas.
- Built-in Load Balancing
Nodes actively shift traffic loads away from PoPs experiencing localized attack saturation towards less congested regions. Keeping flows evenly distributed prevents outages.
- Integrated Threat Detection
In addition to dispersing floods, each node filters all traffic against continuously updated signature databases to catch and block known DDoS tools.
- Deep Analytics
Interlinked nodes share metrics, attack characteristics, and threat intelligence to benefit from visibility across the entirety of the network globally. This also facilitates cooperation with law enforcement to trace attacks back to their source when necessary.
V. Maximizing Anycast Routing Performance
While anycast provides DDoS protection by default, tuning configurations based on network telemetry and ongoing traffic analysis can further bolster defenses. Here are tips:
- Gauge Regional Capacities
Monitor attack trends and sizes by geography. Adding excess capacity in regions experiencing more frequent flooding future proofs defenses.
2 Assistance Programs
Peer with networks allowing traffic redirection to their nodes temporarily during extreme attacks above allocated capacities as a contingency measure.
- Calculate Cost Savings
Compare anycast network capacity costs vs. alternate anti-DDoS services to demonstrate ROI, often 70% or greater reduction.
- CDN Integration
Embed anycast routing into content delivery networks themselves for inherent protections from the ground up against growing threats to availability.
VI. Architecting Next-Gen Cloud Applications
With dangers intensifying as shown by the hard numbers, building anycast capabilities into core infrastructure is key for securing modern cloud-native applications and microservices against serious availability threats.
By essentially outsourcing DDoS protection to the network level itself, developers don‘t have to waste time incorporating complex app-layer tuning to handle security – they can instead focus business logic.
VII. Looking Over the Horizon
While anycast routing has emerged today as a lifeboat against DDoS storms leaving traditional defenses capsized, innovations on the frontier will further boost resiliency:
- Integrating Anycast Nodes as Private On-Ramps into Public Clouds
This allows enterprises to land traffic within cloud networks already scrubbed and secured for advanced environments.
- Edge Computing Integration
Distributing anycast PoPs closer to end users by embedding capabilities into edge networks will further reduce latency while expanding capacity.
- Automated Capacity Scaling
Using ML algorithms to forecast attack trends will enable preemptively spin up capacity buffers in anticipation of emerging threats on the horizon.
VIII. Final Thoughts
As DDoS attacks accelerate unforgivingly into dangerous new terrains, anycast routing represents a ray of hope for organizations struggling to stay afloat amidst turbulent threats aiming to sink availability and drown infrastructure.
By distributing capacity globally across interlinking scrubbing centers sharing analytics and threat intelligence, attacks dissipate against collective defenses rather than targeting one location.
Integrating anycast is crucial for safeguarding websites and cloud services from debilitating floods. While balancing cost, latency and scale, a lifeline for surviving today‘s hazardous internet waters awaits.
Stay tuned for our next guide exploring real-world customer use cases applying anycast routing to fend off terabit DDoS sieges successfully with operations running smoothly despite the pandemonium of attacks banging endlessly at the gates. The examples showcase innovative architectures built to withstand the intense elements in the modern threat climate beyond traditional security controls.
Until next time, float on!
