Overview
Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks overwhelm cloud servers with traffic, making the app unavailable to legitimate users. These attacks occur when attackers flood a cloud server or application with excessive traffic, requests, or data, overwhelming the system and making it unavailable to legitimate users. They can be executed using various techniques, such as sending large volumes of network traffic (network-layer DoS) or exploiting application-level vulnerabilities (application-layer DoS). In mobile environments, DoS attacks can disrupt the app’s connectivity to its backend servers, leading to poor user experience and service outages.
Risk factors
DoS attacks arise from these conditions:
- APIs or services without proper rate limiting are vulnerable to being flooded with requests, leading to DoS attacks.
- Attackers can exploit unpatched vulnerabilities in server software to trigger resource exhaustion and cause service disruptions.
- Failure to implement network-layer traffic filtering leaves the system vulnerable to network-level DoS attacks.
- Exposing services or APIs directly to the public internet without proper protections increases the risk of DoS attacks.
Consequences
If a DoS attack is successful, the following could happen:
- Service outage: The app or cloud service becomes unavailable, causing disruptions for users and potentially leading to loss of business or revenue.
- Poor user experience: DoS attacks may degrade app performance, leading to slow response times or connectivity issues.
- Reputation damage: Repeated or prolonged DoS attacks can damage the app provider’s reputation, causing users to lose trust in the service.
- Financial loss: In addition to direct revenue loss from service downtime, companies may face additional costs for mitigation or incident response.
Solutions and best practices
To mitigate the risks associated with DoS attacks, organizations should implement the following security measures:
- Rate limiting: Implement rate limiting for APIs and services to prevent excessive requests from overwhelming the server.
- Traffic filtering: Use Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) and network-layer firewalls to filter out malicious traffic before it reaches the server.
- DDoS mitigation services: Leverage Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) mitigation services, such as Cloudflare or AWS Shield, to protect against large-scale attacks.
- Load balancing: Use load balancing and failover systems to distribute traffic across multiple servers, reducing the impact of DoS attacks.
- Application performance monitoring: App monitoring can help protect mobile apps by monitoring traffic patterns, detecting unusual spikes, and preventing overloading of app components during a DoS attack.