DDoS Testing

An image of a chip.

Evaluate your network's defenses against high-scale cyberattacks

Test your network against real-world distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack emulations. Testing reveals crucial insights about your DDoS mitigation solution, including effectiveness, packet loss, and network quality of service during an attack.

DDoS testing essentials

Essentials

Satelite in space

Emulate DDoS attacks in your own lab

Discover three options for simulating DDoS attack tests on your network. Set up basic attacks using open-source software, single-link attacks using professional network test tools, and multisite attacks using high-speed testing equipment.

Satelite in space

Ready for Record-Setting DDoS?

Explore the fundamental components of the Rapid Reset DDoS attack which peaked at 398 million requests per second.

Satelite in space

DDoS Mitigation Process

Establish an organization-wide DDoS mitigation strategy in four steps: tools, attacks, simulation, and test management. 

Satelite in space

DDoS Tests for Finance and Beyond

Discover a test methodology for ensuring network and device resilience against an ever-changing array of DDoS attacks.

Satelite in space

CENGN Validates DDoS Defenses

Find out how a tech consortium partnered with Keysight to test its DDoS mitigation system on a live, distributed network.

What is DDoS testing?

Overview

DDoS testing simulates a cyberattack in which attackers overwhelm a network with traffic from multiple sources, aiming to make it unavailable to legitimate users. 

By emulating multiple types of DDoS attacks at varying speeds, network operations teams can assess their systems' resilience and identify potential weaknesses before real attackers exploit them. When conducted regularly, DDoS testing can also help hone incident response plans, monitor network quality of service, and ensure that critical services stay online during an actual attack.

Network operations personnel testing a DDoS attack on their network

Benefits of DDoS testing

Benefits

Verify security and mitigation tools

DDoS attacks targeting businesses and government institutions continue to grow in size, frequency, and complexity. Ensure that your security tools will work as planned, stop bad flows, and allow good traffic to pass. Prepare for attacks and harden your defenses by testing your network against a variety of DDoS simulations.

Validate hybrid networks

Optimize your DDoS mitigation solution for hybrid networks. Augment traditional, hardware-based network traffic generators — used to stress test big-iron network infrastructure — with virtualized solutions. Together, these tools enable you to test on-premises and cloud-based network infrastructure against DDoS attacks.

Prevent packet loss

DDoS mitigation tools are a network's first line of defense. However, they can sometimes prove overly effective, blocking legitimate traffic as well. Regular DDoS testing can help reveal instances of legitimate packet loss caused by over-filtering, resource exhaustion, network congestion, misconfigurations, or false positives.

Maintain quality of service

High-performance security tools need a great deal of bandwidth. Left unchecked and unmonitored, however, these tools can create performance bottlenecks. That is why it is crucial to monitor network key performance indicators during DDoS testing. Otherwise, you risk widespread service interruptions, declining productivity, and revenue loss during attacks.

Improve detection and response

Practice makes perfect. Simulating DDoS attacks in a controlled environment shows cybersecurity personnel how their network responds under attack. Regular DDoS tests can help refine incident response processes, reduce mitigation time, significantly reduce false positives, and improve cyberattack readiness overall.

How does DDoS testing work?

Methods

Testing DDoS mitigation hardware and software in a controlled environment helps you understand how well your network is prepared for a real-world attack — without endangering your users or applications. Software-based DDoS emulation tools are the most typical vehicle for this kind of test. However, hardware-based network traffic generators offer increased scale and throughput for testing larger networks.

Tests range from simple attacks using open-source software to complex emulations using high-performance testing rigs. Testing your infrastructure against an array of DDoS techniques — such as application, rate, volumetric, reflection, and fragmentation attacks — helps you ensure that your network can withstand a battery of attack vectors.

Network operations personnel testing a DDoS attack on their network

DDoS test tools

Tools

DDoS emulators

DDoS emulators can work either as standalone virtual testbeds or in conjunction with high-performance network traffic generators. On their own, these powerful software platforms offer convenient application and attack simulation. Cost-effective and elastic, these tools deploy quickly and scale across global networks. Available in standalone and software-as-a-service configurations, DDoS emulation software offers ease of deployment and convenience.

Network traffic generators

High-performance network traffic generators enable network operations teams to test their security resilience at enterprise scale. Capable of testing networks at throughputs in excess of 800GE, these testing appliances can push data center infrastructure to its limit. Offering unparalleled realism and scale, network traffic generators make it easy to measure network performance, reliability, and uptime during an attack — as well as prove DDoS mitigation solutions under the most extreme scenarios.

DDoS test setups

Tests

Network operations personnel testing a DDoS attack on their network

Basic attack simulations

Using open-source tools, you can execute a basic DDoS test on your network to measure your security posture and mitigation solutions. Keep in mind: cybercriminals sometimes use these same tools to carry out real-world attacks — so be sure to use them at your own risk. Moreover, since these attacks are limited in scale, it's challenging to draw lasting conclusions about your network's preparedness. 

If you're comfortable with the risk, you can use open-source tools to emulate simple DDoS attacks, such as a SYN flood. This attack consists of hitting a server with a high volume of SYN packets to overwhelm the target. A simplified SYN flood test is limited to ~50,000 packets per second, but it's an effective way to see how your network withstands a low-volume attack.

Network operations personnel testing a DDoS attack on their network

Complex, medium-density testing

Dedicated DDoS test software offers a variety of real-world attack simulations for small to midsize organizations. More advanced than basic open-source tools, DDoS emulators don't just create attacks — they can disguise them in legitimate network traffic. These tools can simulate a range of application traffic protocols, such as social media traffic, peer-to-peer, gaming, enterprise business applications, and video.

The increased realism of DDoS emulators means you can get a more holistic portrait of your network security posture by emulating multiple attack types. For example, Keysight BreakingPoint Virtual Edition offers 36,000+ security strikes, 6,000+ recorded attacks, and 100+ common evasion techniques. However, virtual-only solutions like these have one major downside: scalability. Organizations with network bandwidth greater than 10 GB will need a hybrid setup with high-capacity test hardware.

Network operations personnel testing a DDoS attack on their network

Large-scale emulations

For enterprise-grade DDoS tests, you need more than just software. You need to pair an emulation platform with high-performance testing hardware that can generate network traffic profiles at an internet scale. A hybrid setup like this helps ensure that your network can withstand a DDoS attack of any size.

For example, using Keysight BreakingPoint software with a Keysight APS-ONE-100 network traffic generator, you can emulate DDoS attacks at 100,000 Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections per second, 3.2 million TLS concurrent connections, and 150 Gbps of encrypted throughput. However, no matter how strong your network defenses are, DDoS attacks will still impact users and infrastructure. Realistic, large-scale test setups like these also enable you to identify the maximum thresholds your servers can withstand — and the minimum level of network performance to maintain uptime.

What to look for in a DDoS test solution

Considerations

Coverage

Multiple attack vectors

DDoS attacks range from basic SYN floods and user datagram protocol fragmentation attacks to sophisticated reflection and botnet attacks. Cybercriminals are willing to use every tool in their arsenal to bring down a network. That's why it's important to test your network against as many exploits as possible — including application, rate, volumetric, reflection, and fragmentation attacks.
Throughput

Volumetric scalability

It's one thing to emulate the tactics, techniques, and procedures of a DDoS attack. However, without adequate scale, it's impossible to fully assess your network's response under attack. For example, the Rapid Reset DDoS attack peaked at a record-setting 398 million requests per second. That's why it's critical to have a DDoS test solution that can generate a similar level of throughput. Otherwise, you leave your infrastructure, users, and applications to chance.
Threat Intelligence

Ongoing attack updates

Security isn't static. Cybercriminals are always looking for new techniques to try and new vulnerabilities to exploit. That's why leading DDoS test tools rely on threat intelligence subscriptions to stay ahead of the curve. Backed by global research, threat intelligence teams regularly issue new test plans, attack simulations, and network traffic profiles.
Network Realism

Massive-scale traffic generation

Many organizations conduct DDoS tests in isolation — configuring attacks only, with no legitimate network traffic along with them. This scenario is unrealistic because mitigating attacks is much easier when there are no other services you need to keep running. In contrast, realistic test scenarios emulate good and bad traffic at scale to see if mitigation tools can keep legitimate traffic flowing while mitigating all malicious DDoS flows.
Content Realism

Application simulation

Content realism is critical in validating DDoS mitigation tools, as it directly impacts inspection performance. Therefore, an ideal DDoS test solution should be able to parameterize applications with representative network payloads. Application simulation functionalities include Markov text generation, dictionary functions, dynamic file generation, multi-language capability, and randomized data within application flows.

Frequently asked questions about DDoS testing

FAQs

A distributed denial-of-service attack is a cyberattack that aims to disrupt a targeted website, server, or network by overwhelming it with internet traffic. In most cases, a cybercriminal will use a fleet of compromised devices (bots) to send numerous requests to the targeted entity — ultimately consuming its resources and bandwidth to manage legitimate traffic. In the end, the sheer volume of traffic proves too much for the target entity and crashes it, rendering it inaccessible to users.

DDoS testing helps organizations identify vulnerabilities before a real attack occurs — improving network resilience and availability during an attack. DDoS testing provides an opportunity to evaluate security tools like DDoS mitigation solutions. It also enables security teams to test their response plans to ensure that they can react effectively to an attack.

DDoS tests come in a variety of types. Here are some examples.

 

  • Volumetric attacks overwhelm systems with malformed packets or large amounts of data. 
  • Application-based attacks target specific applications or services. 
  • Reflection attacks start with legitimate requests before snowballing into a chain of queries that overwhelm network infrastructure.
  • Protocol attacks exploit weaknesses in network protocols, such as Transmission Control Protocol, to disrupt communication.
  • Memory or CPU-based attacks disrupt network operations by consuming all available bandwidth.

DDoS attacks can test networks before or after deployment. Either way, testing can cause potential issues if not managed carefully — or conducted without the proper tools. Risks include accidental network disruptions, tool outages, or legitimate traffic interruptions if the system inadvertently recognizes the user as a threat actor.

Resources

DDoS: Go Deeper

Learn more about DDoS testing with a curated collection of thought leadership.

contact us logo

Get in touch with one of our experts

Need help finding the right solution?

Contact us