Cyber Security Defense Systems

We often talk about the cyber threats that surround us, as individuals, and especially as organizations that serve as targets for malicious hackers. It seems that every day more cyber incidents are published and statistics show a rise in the phishing rate. 

It is important to remember that there are ways to defend against these advanced cyber threats, and we’re here to introduce you to 5 cyber solutions that can make our organization safer

Anti-DDOS

The DDOS attack, or denial of service attack,  is a name for a family of cyber attacks that disable computer systems by creating unusual traffic loads.

The Anti-DDOS system prevents the server from shutting down by addressing each type of DDoS attack separately and protects the particular component being exploited.

Volumetric Attacks

This type of attack floods the bandwidth and disables the server due to a lack of free space. One of the most common attacks of this type is a DNS attack, which attempts to disable the “phone book” server of the Internet, and keeps all the domains. A DNS attack sends requests that have a very large volume of information to the server, but instead of requesting that this information reach the applicant’s IP (bots/hackers), they request that the information reach the server, thus flooding it with information.

To protect against this attack, the control system performs a “scrubbing” and uses cloud servers to direct traffic. This disposes of malicious traffic and keeps only authentic requests from real users that wish to have their data transferred to their IP.

Protocol Attacks 

Utilizing network-level weakness, this type of attack sends initial connection requests (SYN). The attack causes flooding because the server must respond to SYN requests in one of the following ways:

• Confirm login request
• Send a command to complete the login process
• Wait for a reply from the sender of the request
• Crash after waiting for too many responses

The control component blocks malicious traffic before it reaches the site, with advanced systems able to analyze the information and detect malicious requests.

Attack On The Application Layer 

Attackers send standard requests such as uploading a URL or image but do so in quantities and in a short period of time that the system is not used to. Alternatively, hackers generate legitimate traffic that arrives very slowly, causing servers to be “busy” with requests and preventing real users from accessing the server. You can also exploit known vulnerabilities in APACHE, also known as the HTTP server, which is one of the 2 most popular protocols for communication via the Internet.

The Anti-DDoS controls to prevent this type of attack by monitoring the behavior of visitors to the site, blocking bots responsible for attacks at the application level, and examining visitors who use multiple devices in tests such as:

Cookie Verification – Sending to each customer, validating and using a legitimate cookie, asking the customer to send the cookie back using the HTTP 302 protocol (referral). A legitimate browser will pass this test without the user noticing, while bots used for DDoS attacks do not store cookies and therefore will not be able to pass.

The CAPTCHA protocol is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. The site or system produces a random question that a person can easily answer, but is difficult for a robot or computer.

Next-Gen Firewall

A standard firewall allows blocking traffic according to location, port, protocol, and other filters defined by the server admin.

The NGFW provides all the firewall filters but also allows modern threats such as malware and attacks on the application layer to be blocked. NGFW includes integration of intrusion prevention capabilities, application-level vigilance that enables blocking and control of dangerous applications, and a knowledge base on threats.

WAF

Application Firewall helps protect WEB-based applications by filtering and monitoring HTTP requests and traffic between the Internet and the application layer and often protects against XSS attacks, SQL injections, and more. It is basically a layer of protection between the Internet and the application, and it protects the server.

URL Filtering

Restricts access by comparing Internet traffic to a database that includes addresses that are divided into secure URL categories into suspicious URLs.

Computer Encryption

Encryption is a digital version of cryptography, which is used in mathematical algorithms to confuse messages, allowing only those who have the key to the algorithm to decipher the text.

Symmetric encryption can be performed that uses only one private key, which is basically a password that the user creates and is mainly relevant for encrypting files.

And asymmetric encryption, on the other hand, uses a combination of multiple keys that are both private and public. This method is used for communication like WhatsApp and email. Each user has a public key that serves as an address, and a private key that combines both to allow each party to decipher the message received by them.

Computer encryption is the act of encrypting all the files that are on the computer and does not require the user to keep the files in a specific location. The user must provide code or alternatively let the computer run an encryption key from a USB device. This includes not only the basic password that is used to unlock the computer but integrations of third-party systems that provide more advanced encryption as well.