Distributed Denial of Service Prevention Techniques

— The significance of the DDoS problem and the increased occurrence, sophistication and strength of attacks has led to the dawn of numerous prevention mechanisms. Each proposed prevention mechanism has some unique advantages and disadvantages over the others. In this paper, we present a classification of available mechanisms that are proposed in literature on preventing Internet services from possible DDoS attacks and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each mechanism. This provides better understanding of the problem and enables a security administrator to effectively equip his arsenal with proper prevention mechanisms for fighting against DDoS threat.