Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS) represents an important threat to your website. Here’s why they …
DDoS attacks threaten all sizes of websites and companies including individual live streamers.
They are on the rise and rising in size, intensity and hacktivism with more than 50 million attacks per year.
That’s almost two attacks every second of the day in one year!
The attacks rose by 125 percent year-on-year with a 35 percent rise in length of the attack, lasting from 6-24 hours.
DDoS attacks had seen even higher traffic levels with the advent of the IoT.
They account for a staggering one-third of all downtime on the website, and can be bought on the black market for as little as $150.
In a nutshell, there have been DDoS attacks for years but now they have grown to be more destructive and easier to launch than ever.
When cyber criminals create more disruptive tactics, anyone who uses the internet can learn about and how to defend against DDoS attacks.
Why do DDoS attacks happen?
DDoS attacks mess with daily operations by disrupting performance and availability. How? How?
At the most simple point, your website is overwhelmed by a DDoS attack with so much traffic that your website becomes slow, irresponsive and finally crashes.
In order to orchestrate this symphony of traffic, a hacker uses an already infected remotely controlled computer, otherwise known as a bot, short for robot.
A collection of those devices that are infected is called a botnet.
Basically a remote control army of zombies willing to disable or kill any device in its way.
Unfortunately there’s no end to the bad news because not all DDoS attacks come from botnets.
Types Of DDoS Attacks
DDoS attacks can fall into three broad categories, depending on the attack.
1. Volumetric Attacks (also known as Network-Centric Attacks)
a. The most common types of DDoS attacks
b. Use botnets to consume bandwidth
c. Examples include NTP Amplification, DNS Amplification, UDP Flood, TCP Flood
2. State-Exhaustion Attacks (also known as Protocol Attacks)
a. Exploits a weakness in the Layer 3 and Layer 4 protocol stack
b. Targets the connection state in firewalls, web application servers, load balancers
c. Examples include Syn Flood, Ping of Death
3. Application-Layer Attacks
a. The most sophisticated of attacks and most challenging to identify/mitigate
b. Operated by a single machine, it’s very stealthy and able to fly “under the radar”
c. Examples include HTTP Flood, Attack on DNS Services, HTTPS, and SMTP
DDoS Shield
Here are a few protections for effective DDoS protection:
1. Extra Bandwidth: Increasing the bandwidth available to your web server is an effective way to improve DDoS protection. In this way, the website can accommodate sudden and unexpected traffic spikes. However, this is more of a buffer than a complete solution that provides crucial time to act before exhausting your resources.
2. Defend Network Perimeter: You can also boost the security perimeter of your network by taking additional safety measures, such as
I speed restricting the router to stop crippling web servers
ii) letting go of spoofed or malformed packages
iii) set lower thresholds for SYN, ICMP and UDP floods
This is however very technical and will require some level of knowledge of incident handling to respond effectively to DDoS attacks.
3. DDoS Specialist: Another option is to hire a DDoS specialist to save you from the onslaught during a crisis. That will require deep pockets, though, as it’s very costly.
4. Fixhackedwebsite: Since the above solutions may not be within your budget or information range, Fixhackedwebsite provides you with DDoS protection as a turnkey defence. This web security solution comes with cure, prevention and live 24/7/365 support.