Distributed denial of service (DDoS) assaults has been used by hackers to take down some of the biggest websites in the world since the turn of the new millennium. You may have heard the term DDoS before, but in this article you’ll discover what it means, how different sorts of attacks might affect your website, how to identify whether your website has been hacked, and – most importantly – how to protect your website.
What is a DDoS Attack?
A DDoS attack involves cybercriminals flooding a server with traffic, and overwhelming it with requests. The goal is to overwhelm a website with “fake” requests in an attempt to take it down. The attacks use multiple computers in different networks that have malware – called a “botnet” – to send large numbers of simultaneous requests to your website.
Different Types of Attacksnot
DDoS assaults come in three varieties:
Volume Based Attacks – Volumetric DDoS attacks increase the volume of traffic sent to the server, overloading the network bandwidth. ICMP and UDP floods are common examples.
Protocol Attacks – Using vulnerabilities in the protocol stack, this type of attack consumes bandwidth of critical network infrastructure elements (servers, load balancers, etc.) by sending malicious requests to Layer 3 and Layer 4. There are several common examples of flooding, including SYN floods and the Ping of Death.
Application Layer Attacks – In this type, vulnerabilities are exploited in the application layer itself (Layer 7). As they can sometimes achieve their goal (crashing the web server) with a smaller number of requests than the other two types, these attacks are often the most difficult to identify. Examples of these attacks include low-and-slow attacks and GET/POST floods.
An infamous DDoS attack involved the Mirai botnet, which used thousands of hacked IoT devices to overwhelm Dyn, which manages domain names for popular sites such as Amazon, Etsy, and Netflix
Even when an assault fails to bring down a website, it frequently slows it down to the point where it is no longer useable, infuriating users and costing the business a lot of money. For hackers, these attacks are very inexpensive, which is maybe one of the reasons they accounted for 35% of cyberattacks in 2017. Some organisations may launch DDoS attacks on unprotected servers for as little as $100 per day; for servers that are protected, the cost rises to $400 per day.
Even a single day of downtime may be very expensive, especially for e-commerce companies.
How to Identify an Attacked Website
While not all surges in traffic patterns are bad, it’s important to identify DDoS attacks as soon as possible when you suspect one is behind a surge. It can be challenging to distinguish between a legitimate traffic spike and one caused by a DDoS attack. If the slow service persists for days after a sale or marketing campaign, your site may be under attack. Spam emails can also be a sign of an attack if they spike significantly.
3 Ways to Protect Your Website
Rather than simply surviving an attack, take steps to prevent one with DDoS protection. About 66% of DDoS-targeted sites are attacked more than once, according to research. The following are some essential places to start:
Web Application Firewall
Starting with web application firewalls (WAFs) is a good idea since they can distinguish between DDoS attacks and legitimate traffic. With a WAF, you can protect your website from these attacks and make sure your customers have uninterrupted access.
Content Delivery Network
A content delivery network (CDN) can improve your site’s speed, SEO, and make it harder for hackers to find your server and attack it. When using a CDN, your content is delivered online using a collection of servers, so it’s harder to identify your main server. CDN optimizations can also reduce the amount of bandwidth that a primary server has to use, preventing easily overloaded servers. It will also help prevent bad traffic from passing through a CDN’s secure port protocol.
Have a DDoS Response Plan
While assaults that bring down websites can be carried out for as low as $1 per minute, website downtime can cost small and medium enterprises between $137 and $427 per minute. Knowing that you must act quickly is the first step since you cannot outlast an attack. Inform your web hosting company of the situation so that they might possibly keep an eye on the traffic and restrict it to protect their servers.
A rise in customer communications is also anticipated as customers report the outage and ask questions. Because you’ll need all hands on deck to counter the attack, automate your responses wherever you can.
As IoT devices become more popular, DDoS threats and attacks will become more prevalent – and the costs of conducting them will decrease further. The best way to handle these cyberattacks is to prevent them, and that starts with effective cybersecurity tools and a reliable response plan. Do you want your customers and stakeholders to be better protected? Find out what Nemasis Cyber security solutions can do for you, and get a quote for automatic DDoS mitigation services right away.
