(Newswire.net — November 26, 2015) — In the wake of the much-publicised TalkTalk security breach, where the company’s servers suffered a major and prolonged DDoS attack, most businesses should be taking this threat seriously.
It is difficult to protect yourself against DDoS attacks if you don’t know what they are and how they can affect your business. Here is what you need to know about DDoS attacks.
What is a DDoS attack?
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks involve the use of multiple systems or botnets to bombard your website with traffic until the server is overloaded with connections and can no longer respond to legitimate users. Stable and secure hosting solutions, such as 100TB Bare Metal Servers, will be able to cope with this kind of threat.
However, a huge number of websites do not have the necessary safeguards in place to handle DDoS attacks. Therefore, it is imperative to understand how they work and what you can do to protect yourself.
How does a DDoS attack work?
Network resources like your web servers can only process a limited number of requests at the same time. However, the channel that connects your server to the Internet will also have a finite capacity.
So, whenever the number of requests exceeds the capability limits of any infrastructure component, your website’s service level will suffer. As a result, the response to requests will ether slow down or be completely ignored.
Cyber criminals that deploy DDoS attacks want to prevent your network resources from working altogether, quite literally a ‘denial of service.’ This kind of attack will typically target e-commerce sites, online casinos, or any business that could be storing confidential information like the credit card details of customers on their website.
What can you do to protect yourself from a DDoS attack?
Thankfully, there are several approaches you can take to defend yourself against a DDoS attack. The most common and effective include:
- Routers and firewalls – Routers can be configured to filter nonessential protocols and stop invalid IP addresses, while firewalls are capable of shutting down specific flows associated with an attack.
- Intrusion-detection systems – These can be used in conjunction with firewalls to automatically block traffic but also recognise when valid protocols are being used as an attack vehicle.
- Over-provisioning – To deal with spikes in demand you can buy excess bandwidth or redundant network devices, which tend to be scalable too.
- Black-holing or sink-holding – Similar to packet-filtering and rate-limiting measures, this measure will block all traffic and divert it to a black hole. However, even legitimate users will be targeted.
- DDoS mitigation appliances – You can either build DDoS mitigation functionality into devices used for other functions such as load balancing or create dedicated devices for cleaning up traffic.
- Servers – Through the correct configuration of your website server it will be possible to define what resources an application can use and how to respond to requests from clients.
Implement the aforementioned measures and your website will be adequately protected against DDoS attacks.