CISA, The FBI, And MS-ISAC Release DDoS attack Guidance For The Public Sector 

In a joint advisory, CISA, the FBI, and MS-ISAC has published new guidance, Understanding and Responding to Distributed Denial-Of-Service Attacks, for federal, state and local government agencies to help prevent disruption to critical services.

The advisory noted that DDoS attacks are difficult to trace and block and are commonly used by politically motivated attackers, with government websites often targeted by one of three types of DDoS attacks: Volume-based, Protocol-based attacks, and Application layer-based attacks. 

  • The guidelines emphasized that there are steps that can be taken to mitigate the possibility of being hit. These include:
  • Use risk assessments to identify potential vulnerabilities
  • Implement robust network monitoring tools and detection systems 
  • Integrate a Captcha challenges
  • Configure your firewalls to filter out suspicious traffic 
  • Regularly patch and update all software, operating systems and network devices
  • Train employees about DDoS attacks, and how to recognize and report suspicious activities

The advisory also emphasized the importance of putting in place measures to maintain service availability during a DDoS attack such as increasing bandwidth capacity and implementing load balancing solutions to distribute traffic to handle sudden spikes in traffic during an attack. Also, establish redundancy and failover mechanisms to redirect traffic and regularly back up critical data to allow for fast recovery and minimize data loss.

Stephen Gates, Principal Security SME, Horizon3.ai had this to say:

   “Although volumetric DDoS attacks have been pretty much defeated by those who offer cloud-based DDoS defenses, protocol-based attacks and application layer-based attacks are still a resounding problem. These attacks are often low-and-slow attacks are extremely difficult to defeat in the cloud since defenses regularly end up blocking legitimate traffic.

   “For those who are concerned about DDoS attacks, the best approach is a hybrid one. Subscribe to cloud-based DDoS defensive services to defeat volumetric attacks and deploy specialty-built DDoS defenses on-premises in front of your border firewalls to defeat the low-and-slow attacks. This way, all types of DDoS attacks can be defeated.”

A DDoS attack can be highly disruptive if an organization isn’t prepared to defend against one. So it is in any organization’s interest to add this to the list that they need to have a playbook for. Fortunately this joint advisory will help with that.

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