When
you have not taken the right steps to safeguard your site against potential
threats, your site can become a victim of DDoS and DoS attacks. DDoS attacks
are not simply those which can stop users from accessing a site because it
becomes slow and inaccessible due to too many user requests. These attacks are
now coming in different flavors. Today, they have the power to attack the
infrastructure and applications of any enterprise.
What happens in a DDoS attack?
During
a DDoS attack, the system
gets hit with an overwhelming number of user requests or queries from bots all
across the world and it fails to handle legitimate requests. The system then
virtually stops functioning and the servers become unresponsive. Both the
Denial or Service or DoS and Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks aim
at disrupting and denying services of any system or website. While the DoS
attack will need only a single or a few launch systems to get triggered, the
DDoS attacks will require many distributed systems for launch.
How can DDoS Services help?
The
DDOS services are meant to mitigate such attacks which are targeted at
overwhelming defenses of the site. DDoS attacks can be of many types, namely:
Traffic attacks where the traffic flooding will transfer many TCP, ICPM packets to targets and legitimate requests are lost in the process.
Application attacks where the data messages in the
application layer can reduce the resources here and leave the system
vulnerable.
Bandwidth attacks where the target is over flooded
with huge volumes of junk data which leads to reduced network bandwidth and
results in total denial of service.
When
you find that y our website can become prone to DDoS attacks, you should
immediately go shopping for firewalls. However, you are likely to get confused
as there are too many options and not all WAF or support teams are equal. While
some make very tall claims, they are found to be struggling with attack complexities.
When you are looking for reliable DDoS services, you
must find out whether the services uses crowd sourcing techniques which can
protect the client base at once. Collective knowhow regarding the existing
threats helps to build a huge database of information which can be spread
across the community through Big Data analytics.
You should also ensure that the WAF or Web Application Firewall is certified by the PCI or Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council.
While the dedicated DDoS security solutions can help
to stop regular DDoS attacks they may not be capable of tackling the bigger
attacks. Sometimes such attacks can affect more than 200Gbps of throughput.
When businesses are keen to reduce downtime instances they must prevent
volumetric attacks at any cost before these can enter the network.
You must also ensure that the DDoS services you have
signed up with can detect anomalies. This is basically the practice of
identifying those items or events which may not follow a regular expected
pattern. So, anomaly detection will be checking behavioral patterns that may
not be human.
Ideally your DDoS services provider should be able
to use artificial intelligence together with human intelligence because, given
enough time, attackers will be ultimately able to find ways to breach the
network. So, you need capable people who can understand the shift in strategies
and make necessary adjustments.
When
you find a provider which can ensure all the above-mentioned features for you,
it is a good idea to sign up with it. The business of such attacks is on the
rise and now DDoS attacks are being used for revenge, ransom, extortion etc. If
you do not take measures right away to sign up for DDoS services, you will be
like sitting ducks for these cyber criminals.