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Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on government web sites are becoming bigger in scale and more frequent these days. According to FutureGov, leveraging the cloud as a defense mechanism becomes your first layer of defense. Servers distributed across the entire Internet and traffic from a particular part of the world will be routed from a particular server before it reaches the actual address of the web site.
“‘This distributed server network then becomes your first layer of defense, which can absorb or black hole the traffic, or simply send it back to where it comes from,’ Lim explains. The decision as well as what tools to employ should be in the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) – the guidelines a particular government or agency follows when attacked.
“‘The person who first sees the alert of abnormal traffic is probably not a decision maker,’ Lim elaborates. ‘Therefore a proper escalation mechanism needs to be in place by which depending on the severity of attacks, different levels of decision makers are informed immediately to decide how to respond.’
“For example, if an agency’s infrastructure is distributed and resilient enough that it is capable to absorb the traffic coming in without being compromised; it might make a decision to absorb the traffic such the attacks are not directed to another agency or organization which might not be able to sustain them.”
