Corero. DDoS Impact on Mobile Networks – Radio Congestion

Most CSP’s and Mobile Carriers have deployed some form of DDoS scrubbing complex in their network to clean large, long duration DDoS attacks. While this is a necessary first step in proactively working to defeat the DDoS challenge, the threat landscape is constantly changing and requires a more modern approach to protection.

Based on recent attack vectors, Corero has monitored for its own customers, there has been a rapid shift by attackers from large capacity attacks to short duration multi-vector attacks. In fact, Corero has found that 93% of DDoS attack attempts against their customers are 1Gbps or less in size. Further, 96% of attack attempts averaged 30 minutes or less in duration.  These types of attacks are too short to be re-directed to a scrubbing center and appear as noise on a typical CSP/Mobile backbone network.

Unfortunately, once they hit the LTE RAN, these attacks will result in collateral damage and congestion on the radio network. The only way to prevent / mitigate these forms of attacks is to stop them in real-time with an inline DDoS solution placed at the entry point of the internet connection or the network interconnect.

A DDoS system placed at this strategic location has to meet very specific characteristics:

  • Very high performance
  • High session / flow count
  • Instantaneous mitigation
  • High granularity to separate good from bad traffic flows
  • Do-No-Harm

As mobile networks carry on increasing capacity and performance, CSP’s and Mobile carriers now offer enterprise based services across this infrastructure. To ensure customer reliability, experience and security, CSP’s and Mobile carriers will need to protect their most valuable asset from congestion and downtime as a result of multi-vector short duration DDoS attacks.

The only way to achieve this will be to deploy a high performance, highly scalable inline DDoS mitigation system such as the Corero SmartWall Threat Defense system (TDS).

You can read the original article, here.