DDoS Attacks: How to Harden the Firewall

DDoS Protection, Firewall Security & Network Hardening

A DDoS attack could choke your network, stop operations, and result in monetary loss. Properly configuring your firewall to prevent these kinds of attacks is critical.

Now let’s get into the hardening best practices for a firewall against DDoS threats.

Understanding DDoS Attacks

A DDoS attack overwhelms your network with malicious traffic, consuming your bandwidth or firewall resources. These assaults take various forms:

• Volumetric attacks – Fills your internet connection with junk data.
• Protocol Attacks – These target the weaknesses in network protocols such as TCP SYN floods or Ping of Death.
• Application Layer Attacks – Targets web servers with HTTP floods to use up available resources.

Proper firewall setup can allow you to filter out unwanted malicious traffic and allow legitimate users to reach your services. Let’s look at how to implement firewalls for DDoS protection.

Firewalls

A correctly configured firewall is your first line of defense against DDoS attacks. Use these techniques to effectively filter traffic:

• Allow Only What is Legitimate – Set Access Control Lists (ACLs) to deny IPs, geolocations, or questionable traffic patterns.
• Configure Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) – To allow only legitimate responses and block requests not initiated by internal devices.
• Block Unused Protocols – Disable unused ports and protocols which can be used by attackers.
• Geo-IP Filtering – If your business only serves specific countries, block high-risk country traffic.

Some advanced techniques to strengthen firewall security include:

• Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) – Analyzes traffic packets to detect anomalous hacker behavior and block harmful requests.

Strategic firewall configuration is critical to keeping operations unexposed to threats.

Intrusion Prevention & Rate Limiting

Firewalls should not only be designed to drop bad traffic but also to intelligently determine the risk of dropping or limiting the volume of incoming requests. Here’s how:

• Rate Limiting – Limit requests per second from a single IP to avoid a flood of requests.
• Connection Timeouts – Implement timeouts to quickly terminate inactive connections, ensuring available network resources.
• DDoS Scrubbing – Firewalls with scrubbing capabilities filter out abnormal traffic.
• Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) – Monitors attack patterns in real-time and prevents suspected IPs.
• Blacklist & Whitelist Management – Automatically ban known malicious IPs while granting trusted IP ranges.

These measures help protect your network against flooding-type attacks while ensuring availability.

Panda Jump Networks DDoS-Resistant Firewall Setup

If you rent a managed firewall, you are free of worries, as they already offer native DDoS protection ideal for businesses.

Reasons to Rent a Firewall Rather Than Purchase

• Cost-effective – Skip initial hardware expense and excessive licensing costs.
• Top-notch Network Management – We deploy a cumbersome setup for you, so you only manage a pre-configured firewall.
• Automatic Updates & Patching – Never miss the latest security and software updates.
• Scalability – Increase resources according to traffic requirements and attack patterns.

Other Highlights of PJ Networks’ Firewall Rental

• DDoS Mitigation with High Traffic Filtering – Our firewalls block bad traffic before it enters your network.
• Real-Time Monitoring – Receive notifications and reports of attack attempts.
• Cloud-Based Security – Prevents large-scale attacks from reaching your on-premises infrastructure.
• 24/7 Security Support – Access security experts whenever you need assistance.

By choosing to rent a DDoS-resistant firewall from PJ Networks, you can keep your infrastructure protected 24/7 without additional burdens, as there are no setup and maintenance costs to bear.

Conclusion

DDoS Protection, Firewall Security, Network Hardening

By using your firewall to filter traffic, provide intrusion prevention, and implement rate limiting, you can significantly mitigate DDoS attacks.

However, managing firewall settings can be tedious and require extensive experience. This is why most businesses today rent firewalls with DDoS protection, eliminating operational overhead. Secure your network instantly with 24/7 in-line security using a dedicated firewall rental.