Immediate Response Actions During an Attack

The first moments of a DDoS attack are crucial for minimizing damage. Begin by activating your incident response plan and alerting all relevant team members. Quick communication ensures coordinated response efforts and prevents conflicting mitigation attempts. Establish a clear command structure with defined roles for technical response, communication, and business decisions.

Enable emergency mitigation mode on all DDoS protection services. Many organizations make the mistake of keeping protection services in detection-only mode to avoid false positives. During an active attack, immediately switch to full mitigation mode. Accept that some legitimate traffic might be affected – stopping the attack takes priority over perfect accuracy.

Increase logging verbosity across all systems to capture detailed attack data. Enhanced logging helps identify attack patterns, source addresses, and targeted resources. This information proves invaluable for fine-tuning mitigation rules and potentially tracking attackers. Configure log aggregation to centralize attack data for easier analysis.

Implement emergency rate limiting across all services. Start with conservative limits that might impact some legitimate users, then gradually relax them as the attack subsides. It's easier to apologize to a few affected customers than to have your entire service offline. Configure different rate limits for different resources based on their criticality and normal usage patterns.