NETWORK DDOS INCIDENT RESPONSE
CHEAT SHEETCollaborate with your BCP/DR planning team, tounderstand their perspective on DDoS incidents.

If the bottle neck is a particular a feature of anapplication, temporarily disable that feature.

Tips for responding to a network distributed denial‐of‐service (DDoS) incident.

Harden the configuration of network, OS, andapplication components that may be targeted by DDoS.

If possible, add servers or network bandwidth to handle
the DDoS load. (This is an arms race, though.)

General Considerations

Baseline your current infrastructure’s performance, so
you can identify the attack faster and more accurately.

If possible, route traffic through a traffic‐scrubbing
service or product via DNS or routing changes.

Analyze the Attack

If adjusting defenses, make one change at a time, so
you know the cause of the changes you may observe.

DDoS attacks often take the form of flooding thenetwork with unwanted traffic; some attacks focus on
overwhelming resources of a specific system.
It will be very difficult to defend against the attack
without specialized equipment or your ISP’s help.
Often, too many people participate during incident
response; limit the number of people on the team.

Understand the logical flow of the DDoS attack andidentify the infrastructure components affected by it.
Review the load and logs of servers, routers, firewalls,applications, and other affected infrastructure.

Configure egress filters to block the traffic your systems
may send in response to DDoS traffic, to avoid adding
unnecessary packets to the network.

Identify what aspects of the DDoS traffic differentiate itfrom benign traffic (e.g., specific source IPs, destination
ports, URLs, TCP flags, etc.).

Wrap‐Up the Incident and Adjust

If possible, use a network analyzer (e.g. tcpdump, ntop,Aguri, MRTG, a NetFlow tool) to review the traffic.

If necessary, adjust assumptions that affected thedecisions made during DDoS incident preparation.

Contact your ISP and internal teams to learn about theirvisibility into the attack, and to ask for help.

Assess the effectiveness of your DDoS response
process, involving people and communications.

If contacting the ISP, be specific about the traffic you’d
like to control (e.g., blackhole what networks blocks?
rate‐limit what source IPs?)

Consider what relationships inside and outside yourorganizations could help you with future incidents.

Find out whether the company received an extortion
demand as a precursor to the attack.

1.

Preparation: Establish contacts, define procedures,and gather tools to save time during an attack.

If possible, create a NIDS signature to focus todifferentiate between benign and malicious traffic.

2.

Analysis: Detect the incident, determine its scope,and involve the appropriate parties.

Confirm DNS time‐to‐live (TTL) settings for the systems
that might be attacked. Lower the TTLs, if necessary, tofacilitate DNS redirection if the original IPs get attacked.

Notify your company’s executive and legal teams; upon
their direction, consider involving law enforcement.

3.

Mitigation: Mitigate the attack’s effects on thetargeted environment.

Mitigate the Attack’s Effects

4.

Establish contacts for your ISP, law enforcement, IDS,
firewall, systems, and network teams.

While it is very difficult to fully block DDoS attacks, you
may be able to mitigate their effects.

Wrap‐up: Document the incident’s details, discuss
lessons learned, and adjust plans and defenses.

Additional DDoS Response References

Document your IT infrastructure details, including
business owners, IP addresses and circuit IDs; prepare a
network topology diagram and an asset inventory.

Attempt to throttle or block DDoS traffic as close to thenetwork’s “cloud” as possible via a router, firewall, loadbalancer, specialized device, etc.

Understand business implications (e.g., money lost) oflikely DDoS attack scenarios.

Terminate unwanted connections or processes onservers and routers and tune their TCP/IP settings.

If the risk of a DDoS attack is high, consider purchasing
specialized DDoS mitigation products or services.

If possible, switch to alternate sites or networks using
DNS or another mechanism. Blackhole DDoS traffictargeting the original IPs.

DDoS incidents may span days. Consider how your teamwill handle a prolonged attack. Humans get tired.
Understand your equipment’s capabilities in mitigatinga DDoS attack. Many under‐appreciate the capabilitiesof their devices, or overestimate their performance.

Prepare for a Future Incident
If you do not prepare for a DDoS incident in advance,
you will waste precious time during the attack.
Contact your ISP to understand the paid and free DDoS
mitigation it offers and what process you should follow.
Create a whitelist of the source IPs and protocols you
must allow if prioritizing traffic during an attack. Include
your big customers, critical partners, etc.

Consider what preparation steps you could have taken
to respond to the incident faster or more effectively.

Key DDoS Incident Response Steps

Denial‐of‐Service Attack‐Detection Techniques
http://www.computer.org/portal/site/dsonline...
A Summary of DoS/DDoS Prevention, etc. Techniques
http://sans.org/reading_room/whitepapers/intrusion/1212.php
Network Protocols and Tools Cheat Sheets
http://packetlife.net/cheatsheets/

This cheat sheet incorporates insights from Daniel Fairchild, Chris Lemieux, Peter McLaughlin, Jose Nazario, Donald Smith, Jim Tuttle, and Lenny Zeltser. It was compiled by Lenny Zeltser, and is distributed
according to the Creative Commons v3 “Attribution” License. File version 1.3. More cheat sheets?