"DDoS attack" is a pretty common term in the world of cybersecurity. It's a term that is heard often in the news because when these attacks do occur they usually cause quite a big scene. But what exactly are DDoS attacks?
DDoS stands for "distributed denial-of-service" meaning at the end of the day the goal of these attacks are to put a stop to your business operations. These attacks can be dangerous as they can bring down entire websites in seconds resulting in hours or days of downtime! As previously mentioned the point of DDoS attacks are to focus on online services and shut them down via overloading their servers. This can be done by sending large amounts of data requests to a website. This overload of traffic ultimately will cause your website to crash and become virtually unusable.
DDoS attacks send thousands of data requests and connections requests to a website at one time with the intention of overloading them. Cybercriminals can either use these to deny a service to people are use the attack as a smoke screen to divert your attention away from more dangerous malware you may be ignoring. Cybercriminals will use a system of hacked computers known as "botnets" in order to flood these servers with requests. These botnets consists of a large group of hacked computers that can be manipulated and used for nefarious purposes. Interestingly these cybercriminals can obtain these botnets using the dark web. Often times more experienced hackers may rent out their botnets to others to use for their own purposes. This means that on the dark web hackers can buy their own DDoS attacks whenever they desire.
It is somewhat hard to determine whether or not you've been attacked as the effects of a DDoS attack can look like a variety of things. Some hints that you may have been attacked include:
It is important to always monitor your website activity closely. Is your website slow to load? Are you having trouble even accessing it? This could potentially mean you've been targeted in a DDoS attack.
Additionally it also important to protect you website with a firewall that can stop unwanted traffic. And finally make sure you that if your website does go down you are backed up with a disaster recovery plan to minimize downtime.
Corporate Information Technologies provides small to mid-market organizations with expert I.T. services including compliance assessment, cybersecurity penetration tests, and comprehensive business continuity planning services. Corporate Information Technologies can help organizations, quantify, create, refine, and mitigate the risks presented by business threatening disasters in whatever form they may be disguised.