DDOS Attack Simulation
The Client's Challenge
Alfa Bank, a leading financial institution, had already established robust security measures to protect against DDoS attacks. However, they desired a thorough evaluation of their IT infrastructure's resilience in the face of unusually high traffic volumes.
By simulating realistic DDoS attacks, the goal was to not only verify the effectiveness of the existing security measures but also to pinpoint potential areas for improvement, ensuring maximum resilience and uninterrupted business operations.
Alfa Bank's primary concern was the severe consequences a successful DDoS attack could trigger. Beyond the temporary loss of essential services like online banking and payment services, such an attack could compromise the bank's reputation, eroding customer trust. Moreover, in a highly regulated industry like banking, a prolonged service disruption could result in hefty financial penalties and regulatory compliance risks.
The Solution of Avebit
To address Alfa Bank's concerns, we designed a multi-phase testing plan combining cutting-edge tools and methodologies.
• Phase 1: Infrastructure Analysis: Initially, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the bank's network architecture and applications, identifying potential weaknesses.
• Phase 2: Network-Level Attack Simulation: We simulated DDoS attacks aimed at saturating available bandwidth and exhausting network resources.
• Phase 3: Application-Level Attack Simulation: We designed and implemented attack scenarios that simulated a high volume of requests to the bank's online services to assess the systems' ability to handle abnormal loads.
• Phase 4: Monitoring and Analysis: Throughout the tests, we closely monitored system performance, recording key metrics such as latency, throughput, and resource utilization. Subsequently, we analyzed the collected data to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
Results and Conclusions
The tests conducted demonstrated the solid resilience of Alfa Bank's IT infrastructure, thanks to the solutions adopted for DDoS protection, that indeed proved effective in mitigating network-level DDoS attacks, absorbing a significant portion of malicious traffic and protecting the origin servers. However, log analysis revealed some critical issues related to the platform's configuration. Specifically, the rate-limiting threshold for HTTP requests was set too high, allowing an attacker to saturate the server's resources with a large number of simultaneous requests. To further increase infrastructure resilience, it was recommended to reduce the rate-limiting threshold and implement challenge-response measures to protect login forms from brute-force attacks.
The Added Value of Avebit
Our technical analysis identified a WAF configuration that was inadequate to protect the bank from DDoS attacks. Through our advanced methodology, we provided the institution with a clear roadmap of the actions needed to mitigate this vulnerability and proactively strengthen its security posture.