Rate Limiting Explained
Businesses today heavily rely on their web applications to connect with customers, provide services, and generate revenue. But as web applications grow in complexity and connectivity, they also become more open to various types of cyberattacks. These assaults have the potential to seriously harm a business’ reputation, customer trust, and financial stability. To protect their web applications, companies are advised to use security measures like rate limiting.
What is Rate Limiting?
Rate limiting is service to regulate the rate at which traffic is permitted to visit a web application. It restricts how many requests can be made in a certain amount of time, preventing malicious or excessive traffic from overwhelming the servers beyond capacity and resulting in downtime or other problems. Rate Limiting is an essential security technique that protects companies against variety of cyberattacks, such as DDoS attacks, brute force attacks, and web scraping.
What are the benefits of Rate Limiting for businesses?
Using Rate Limiting for a business’ web application has several benefits, including:
Protecting against DDoS attacks: One of the most frequent and harmful types of cyberattacks is the DDoS attack. They can seriously disrupt services and cause downtime. By limiting the number of requests that can be sent in a certain amount of time, rate limiting can aid in the prevention of DDoS attacks.
Preventing brute force attacks: Brute force attacks are another prominent sort of cyber attack that businesses These entail hackers guessing login credentials in order to gain access to web properties. By limiting the total number of login attempts, rate limiting can aid in the prevention of brute force attacks.
Blocking web scraping: Attackers use the method of web scraping to gather information from a company’s web properties. By restricting the number of requests that can be made within a specified time period, rate limiting can help to prevent web scraping.
Improving website performance: Rate Limiting can also help improve website performance by reducing the load on servers and ensuring resources are used efficiently. This can result in faster page load times, improved user experience, and increased customer satisfaction.
What extra benefits do line up when you use Rate Limiting service of a CDN provider?
Customizable rules: A good rate limiting service will let users define flexible rules that are tailored to their individual needs. Limits on the number of requests per IP address or user agent, and other restrictions may be included in these rules.
Geolocation: CDN service providers can make use of geolocation to identify traffic coming from particular regions and set rate limits accordingly. This is especially useful for preventing traffic from known attack sources.
Multiple levels of defense: The best CDN providers frequently offer more than one layer of defense against attacks, with rate limiting being just one of them. Web application firewalls, origin shields, and other security measures can be a part of these extra layers.
Real-time monitoring: CDN providers have advanced monitoring systems that enable them to quickly identify and block fraudulent traffic. As a result, companies can swiftly alter rate limiting policies or take other precautions to safeguard their customer’s websites and applications.
Expertise: CDN suppliers have a group of specialists. They can react to threats with speed and efficiency using their expertise.
Medianova Rate Limiting | Customer Use Case
One of Medianova’s customers, which is ranking among the top ten newspapers in Turkey with significant online presence, was experiencing frequent DDoS attacks. They turned to Medianova for resolution and quickly activated Medianova’s Rate Limiting Service, that helped them block excessive traffic from the attacking IP addresses at the edge. 2.422,589 malicious requests were stopped within minutes.
Since then our customer gained a peace of mind, knowing that any DDoS attacks targeting their web properties are mitigated without any downtime or loss of performance on the origin servers, ensuring their users receive uninterrupted service anywhere, everywhere.
Overall, Rate Limiting is a critical security service that helps businesses protect their web properties from cyber attacks. By using measures like Rate Limiting, businesses can avoid costly legal and financial repercussions and continue to grow and thrive in the digital age.
