Multi Layer Approach to Defend DDoS Attacks Caused by Spam

Corporate mail services are designed to perform better than public mail services. Fast mail delivery, large size file transfer as an attachments, high level spam and virus protection, commercial advertisement free environment are some of the advantages worth to mention. But these mail services are frequent target of hackers and spammers. Distributed denial of service attacks are becoming more common and sophisticated. The researchers have proposed various solutions to the DDOS attacks. Can we stop these kinds of attacks with available technology? These days the DDoS attack through spam has increased and disturbed the mail services of various organizations. Spam penetrates through all the filters to establish DDoS attacks, which causes serious problems to users and the data. In this paper we propose a multilayer approach to defend DDoS attack caused by spam mails. This approach is a combination of fine tuning of source filters, content filters, strictly implementing mail policies, educating user, network monitoring and logical solutions to the ongoing attack. We have conducted several experiments in corporate mail services; the results show that this approach is highly effective to prevent DDoS attack caused by spam. The defense mechanism reduced 60% of the incoming spam traffic and repelled many DDoS attacks caused by spam.