Mastering DDoS defense: A survival guide for Australian organisations

This session will focus on the increasing frequency and sophistication of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, which pose significant risks to businesses across multiple sectors. This session will explore the critical role of scalable and proactive defence strategies in protecting Australian organisations. Through real-world examples of recent DDoS attacks, participants will gain insights into the current threat landscape and learn actionable strategies to strengthen their organisation’s resilience against these disruptive threats.

The session will begin by explaining DDoS attacks and how attackers use botnets—compromised networks of devices—to flood systems with illegitimate traffic. This surge leads to system outages, degraded performance, and operational disruption. The following types of DDoS attacks will be covered:

• Volumetric attacks (e.g., UDP floods), overwhelming bandwidth.
• Protocol attacks (e.g., SYN floods), exploiting vulnerabilities in network protocols.
• Application-layer attacks (e.g., HTTP floods), targeting specific applications and exhausting processing capacity.

Participants will gain knowledge on how each type of attack affects operations and infrastructure.

The DDoS threat landscape will then be explored, from global trends to the Australian context. The session highlights Australian-specific data, bringing to light the industries that are most heavily targeted. The use of VPNs and proxies by attackers to obscure their origins will be discussed, highlighting the challenges of attributing and mitigating these attacks.

The session will then examine DDoS trends in Australia, focusing on the rise of hyper-volumetric attacks and the growing frequency of application-layer threats. Cloudflare data will demonstrate the increasing scale and sophistication of these threats, underscoring the need for scalable, proactive defence strategies.

A case study of the largest DDoS attack on record (August/September 2024) will be presented, showcasing how a 3.8 Tbps attack was mitigated using automated, distributed defences. This example will highlight the importance of scalable, automated mitigation systems for Australian organisations facing similar threats.

The session will then shift to how Australian organisations and government entities can strengthen their defences. Strategies include adopting cloud-native architectures to dynamically handle high traffic volumes and implementing Zero Trust security models to continuously verify users and devices. The role of AI and machine learning in automating real-time threat detection and response will also be explored.

Finally, the session will emphasise the importance of cross-industry collaboration and participation in government cybersecurity initiatives. Participants will be encouraged to engage in threat intelligence sharing platforms and consider government-supported programs like to bolster their overall defences.