What practice helps mitigate the risk of DDoS attacks?

Utilizing traffic filtering and rate limiting is an effective practice to mitigate the risk of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. This approach works by analyzing incoming traffic and applying predefined rules to identify and block malicious traffic patterns before they can overwhelm a server or network. Traffic filtering helps to discard irrelevant or harmful requests, allowing legitimate traffic to reach the server, while rate limiting controls the number of requests a user can make in a specific timeframe. This reduces the impact of an attack by controlling the flow of traffic.

Increasing bandwidth capacity can provide temporary relief during a DDoS attack, but it is not a comprehensive solution. Attackers can easily escalate their traffic volume, meaning that simply having more bandwidth does not prevent service disruption.

Disabling firewalls is counterproductive, as firewalls are essential to protect networks from unauthorized access and can help mitigate the effects of DDoS attacks by providing a first line of defense through traffic regulation.

More frequent password changes are important for security in general, but they do not specifically address or mitigate the risks associated with DDoS attacks, which primarily involve high volumes of malicious traffic rather than security breaches related to authentication.