Volumetric vs Application-Layer DDoS: Different Attacks, Different Defences
“DDoS” covers very different attacks. Defending against all of them with one tool rarely works, so it helps to know what each type targets.
Volumetric attacks
These fill your internet links with traffic — often amplified UDP from misused DNS, NTP, memcached or other services. Measured in gigabits or terabits per second, they overwhelm capacity before traffic reaches your firewall.
Defence: upstream filtering and cloud scrubbing with far more capacity than any single site has.
Protocol attacks
SYN floods and similar attacks exhaust connection tables in firewalls, load balancers and servers.
Defence: SYN cookies, connection limits and DDoS-aware edge devices.
Application-layer (Layer 7) attacks
Requests that look legitimate — logins, searches, API calls — sent in volumes the application cannot handle. Bandwidth may be modest, but servers and databases collapse.
Defence: web application firewalls, rate limiting, bot detection, caching and challenge pages.
Layered protection
- Cloud or upstream scrubbing for volume
- Edge devices for protocol abuse
- WAF and application controls for Layer 7
- Monitoring that spots each type quickly
Our DDoS Protection service combines all three layers. Ask for an assessment.
