IP stresser services, booters or while stressers have some legitimate uses, malicious actors to take down websites and networks. If your organization gets hit by a stresser attack, regularly backing up your data is crucial for minimizing business disruption and potential data destruction.
Establish an offline backup
Offsite backups not continuously connected to corporate networks offer protection if attackers breach environments and attempt to destroy on-premise backup archives. Maintaining recent snapshots of critical data in an isolated, offline capacity preserves recovery capability no matter what transpires during a stresser incident response.
Select cloud-based alternatives
While backing up externally via cloud services retains connectivity risks, providers have extensive DDoS protection resources difficult for most stresser attacks to overcome. Cloud-based backup also supports geographic redundancy, facilitating restoration from outages isolated to a single region. Just ensure sufficient bandwidth for rapid reseeding at scale during worst-case contingencies.
Confirm backup integrity
While performing backups is relatively simple, confirming those backups remain viable takes discipline. Periodically sampling restores from backup archives to check for corruption and retention policies relieves nasty surprises if large-scale recovery becomes necessary. Always test integrity before disasters strike.
Accelerate versioning cadences
During times of heightened risk from threats like stresser attacks or when engineers are actively modifying critical systems accelerate backup cycles to hourly rather than daily. More frequent versioning prevents excessive data loss while also providing finer granularity for potential point-in-time restoration needs.
Broaden sources backup up
What does an IP stresser do? While databases, file shares, and email servers tend to get backed up routinely, organizations often overlook other data sources like application configurations, network device OS images, vulnerability scan reports, and security event analytics. Capturing more data widens the potential for restoration, improving resilience.
Focus on backup security
Always encrypt sensitive backup data, particularly archives maintained by third-party services. Ensure strong access controls surround repositories, strictly limiting visibility to only personnel requiring visibility as part of defined responsibilities. Background checks for providers handling backups also help prevent insider risks.
Maintain incident response backups
During stresser attacks, infrastructure elements often shift like redirecting DNS or adding rules to web application firewalls. The roll back more easily post-incident, backup device configs and software just before or during attacks. This facilitates simpler reversal of changes once threats subside.
Prevent backup system overloads
They are backup capacities appropriately to handle enterprise-wide restoration flows if needed after catastrophic incidents. Confirm sufficient bandwidth, storage volumes, recovery points, concurrent streams, library drives, and related assets essential to prevent bottlenecks impacting mass restores. Do not overlook backup systems themselves as choke points when architecting contingencies.
Define rtos and rpos
Discuss with business leaders to define organization-specific recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) appropriate for different systems and data sets. Use these measures to architect backups supporting desired restoration cadences. Confirm senior management agrees these measures indeed align with continuity needs and expectations.
Verify restoration procedures
Just as backups should get tested regularly for integrity assurance, organizations must also validate recovery processes to avoid surprises. Set aside time quarterly or after major infrastructure changes to walk through system restores front to end. This activity verifies staff understands roles and achieves required RTOs without scrambling.
