Tese de mestrado, Segurança Informática, 2022, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de CiênciasDistributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) is one of the most common cyberattack used by malicious
actors. It has been evolving over the years, using more complex techniques to increase its attack power
and surpass the current defense mechanisms.
Due to the existent number of different DDoS attacks and their constant evolution, companies need
to be constantly aware of developments in DDoS solutions
Additionally, the existence of multiple solutions, also makes it hard for companies to decide which
solution best suits the company needs and must be implemented.
In order to help these companies, our work focuses in analyzing the existing DDoS solutions, for
companies to implement solutions that can lead to the prevention, detection, mitigation, and tolerance
of DDoS attacks, with the objective of improving the robustness and resilience of the companies against
DDoS attacks.
In our work, it is presented and described different DDoS solutions, some need to be purchased and
other are open-source or freeware, however these last solutions require more technical expertise by
cybersecurity agents.
To understand how cybersecurity agents protect their companies against DDoS attacks, nowadays, it
was built a questionnaire and sent to multiple cybersecurity agents from different countries and
industries.
As a result of the study performed about the different DDoS solutions and the information gathered
from the questionnaire, it was possible to create a DDoS framework to guide companies in the decisionmaking process of which DDoS solutions best suits their resources and needs, in order to ensure that
companies can develop their robustness and resilience to fight DDoS attacks.
The proposed framework it is divided in three phases, in which the first and second phase is to
understand the company context and the asset that need to be protected. The last phase is where we
choose the DDoS solution based on the information gathered in the previous phases. We analyzed and
presented for each DDoS solutions, which DDoS attack types they can prevent, detect and/or mitigate
