How To Prevent A SYN Flood Attack
SYN floods are a form of DDoS attack that attempts to flood a system with requests in order to consume resources and ultimately disable it.
You can prevent SYN flood attacks by installing an IPS, configuring your firewall, installing up to date networking equipment, and installing commercial monitoring tools.
What Is A SYN Flood Attack?
For every client and server connection using the TCP protocol, a required three-way handshake is established, which is a set of messages exchanged between the client and server.
The handshake process is listed below:
- The three-way handshake is initiated when the client system sends a SYN message to the server.
- The server then receives the message and responds with a SYN-ACK message back to the client.
- Finally, the client confirms the connection with a final ACK message.
A SYN flood manipulates the handshake which allows the attacker to rapidly initiate a connection to a server without finalizing the connection.
The server has to spend resources waiting for half-opened connections, which can consume enough resources to make the system unresponsive to legitimate traffic.
Read More: 10 Cyber Security Trends You Can’t Ignore In 2021
How Do You Prevent SYN Flood Attacks?
You can prevent SYN Flood attack by:
- Installing an IPS to detect anomalous traffic patterns.
- If capability exists, configure the onsite firewall for SYN Attack Thresholds and SYN Flood protection.
- Installing up to date networking equipment that has rate-limiting capabilities.
- Installing commercial tools to gain visibility across the entire network with the ability to see and analyze traffic from different parts of the network.
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