Member Article

Staying Online In The Age Of DDoS Attacks

By Jake Madders, Co-Director, Hyve Managed Hosting

High-profile Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks have caused widespread disruption in recent years and as such have become recognised as one of the most dangerous cyber security threats. In fact, recent research showed that major DDoS attacks have increased 967% this year already. With this in mind, it’s time businesses understood the threat and how best to protect themselves.

DDoS attacks can be traced back to 1997 when an attack on the Las Vegas Strip coincided with one of the world’s largest hacking conventions, DEF CON, taking place in the city. They work by directing such a high number of requests at a single website destination in order to overload the hosting server and cause the site and online services to crash. To achieve this, cyber criminals release malware onto a large number of machines and control them through a command and control centre. With malware running in the background on unsuspecting computers, tablets, phones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, automated ‘botnet’ armies are created. Once an army of multiple compromised devices has been constructed, the attacker can direct web traffic towards a specific server, service or network.

As a result, the attack method has proved popular with hacking groups and those looking to disrupt businesses and government services, or create a smokescreen for something more sinister. Attackers also use DDoS, or the threat of attack, to extort money from victims. Whatever the motivation, the impact can be devastating for any business that relies on its online presence to operate.

Attackers use DDoS on businesses of all types and sizes – they don’t restrict themselves to the big brand names or the richest organisations and the motivation can seem completely random. But, the bottom line is they need to be taken as seriously as any other security threat, be that hacking, ransomware or virus infection. What these all have in common is that prevention is always a better protection strategy than recovery.

This is because downtime can be damaging for many online services, especially for businesses that cannot tolerate any loss in service and this can cause brand damage, affect customer relations, and have major financial repercussions.

There is no single silver bullet to protecting your business against DDoS attacks and as they get more sophisticated, but working with experts to detect, analyse and divert malicious web traffic is essential. Managed hosting providers work to identify and separate bad data packets from the good data packets, preventing malicious traffic from impacting performance while allowing legitimate transactions through.

With the rise of e-commerce and online services comes additional challenges for businesses, so working with a managed service provider to mitigate challenges such as DDoS attacks and provide 24/7 accessibility for customers is becoming ever more crucial to succeed.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Hyve Managed Hosting .