DDoS attacks can be one of the greatest risks to an organization. When your website is down or when web services that your business needs to use are down, this can have a detrimental effect on the nature of your business and its efficiency. Any lost time that is wasted waiting for services to become available again, or that your website is unavailable, can be very costly to a company in the form of lost wages, lost marketing opportunities, and lost sales and revenue. To help mitigate these issues, some businesses may outsource their tech support by using a managed service provider Lincoln company, or something similar that they can utilize, so they know that there are professionals helping them through this and can provide better security for them.

DDoS attacks are certainly not something that is new, however, they are something that is currently on the rise. Many tech security firms estimate that DDoS attacks have grown by over 600% between 2008-2011, with a rate of increase that dramatic between that time period, it means that quite simply anyone is at risk. With the rampant nature of these attacks we will only see them increase in size and scope, which could mean your business, blog or website may experience this issue within the near future.

The Basics of a DDoS attack

Essentially a DDoS attack is known as a distributed denial of service attack or in some cases just a DoS attack for denial of service attack. The idea of these attacks is to make a resource on a webserver completely inaccessible to users across the internet. This is generally accomplished by overloading the servers where website data is hosted and this will trigger the site to shut down and enter a state of inactivity or down time. When a server overloads, it will usually need to reset and if the server is constantly being attacked, it will continue to reset which will cause a consistent downtime. It is with this server downtime you may find it impossible to access certain webpages, services and more, if they are all hosted on the same server that is being attacked.

DDoS attacks are generally considered a violation of acceptable policies which are created by all internet service providers. As a result, anyone who is found co-ordinating a DDoS attack could be subject to criminal charges or fines, especially if they co-ordinate the attack against a major corporation, website or organization.

Reasons for DDoS attacks

Competition: Occasionally, a competitor business or website will DDoS attack another website in order to steal their traffic and sales.

Challenge: Some hackers will perform DDoS attacks against high profile services such as banks and international payment options to challenge themselves.

Protest: If a website is controversial or about a political movement, there have been many cases in which a group of hackers will band together in order to perform a DDoS attack to keep it down.

Poor Service: Sometimes customers are just unhappy with the level of service that a company has, or they are dissatisfied with a website so they opt to try and take it down.

The basic types of DDoS

• Disrupting physical components of the network, such as servers and storage that the website is hosted on;
• Consuming all of the website resources such as the bandwidth cap, disk space and computing power of the servers;
• Changing routing information for the website and redirecting traffic;
• Changing the media on the website and disrupting the website code so it cannot function correctly;
• Resetting TCP sessions constantly making connection to a website impossible.

Symptoms of a DDoS attack

If you are trying to access a website for work, or using your own company website and something seems to be acting up, there are a number of symptoms that can tip your hat to a potential DDoS attack on the server that the website is being hosted on. Some of the most common things that you will see include:

1. Slow Network performance on your website: You may find that transferring files, opening files and even accessing the pages is impossible during an attack.
2. Web pages will not load: If a server has reset, you will not be able to load the website until the server has rebooted once again.
3. No web access: If you have your own server that is under attack you may find that you are completely unable to access other pages on the internet, let alone your own page.
4. Tones of spam mail: one of the methods that can be used to overload a server is through a spam mail bomb. This will overload the server by using your custom email addresses and filling each inbox in your company with spam. If you begin to get an unmanageable amount of spam or junk mail, you may be under attack.

Protecting yourself from DDoS

Luckily, there are some things that you can do to protect yourself from these attacks.

1. Traffic alerts: If you ever receive a massive amount of traffic to your website that could overload the webserver, there are some services you can install within your website code to alert you that the server may overload. This will help you to know if you are being attacked.
2. Firewalls: By finding patterns in the incoming connections to your webpage, you can set up a firewall to block these connections to your website, which can stop the DDoS attack. This will involve identifying the method of DDoS attack, collecting sample packets and then blocking the popular packets from connecting to your server via firewall.
3. Consult a tech firm: An expert who can give you IT consulting in Fort Myers (or elsewhere) would likely know about all of the various forms of DDoS attack and be able to help you to combat each one. Hiring an expert in tech security that has dealt with DDoS attacks in the past will help you to deal with the attack and be back up and running quickly.

Author Byline: This post was shared with you by Dmitri Blackthorn.