Two Misconfigurations That Undo Your DDoS Protection

This post explains that most DDoS protection failures result from misconfiguration rather than lack of tools, describing two failure modes—under-mitigation (attack vectors bypassing protections due to scope, origin exposure, narrow rules, distributed counting, short aggregation windows, or stale allowlists) and over-mitigation (false positives and self-inflicted outages from poorly calibrated thresholds, aggressive bot/challenge rules, or destination-keyed counters). It recommends practical mitigations: test both attack and legitimate traffic survival, map actual internet exposure, validate thresholds with real traffic and aggregation intervals, ensure rate-limit incrementors are per-client, review allowlists regularly, and retest after any material change.