What is a DDoS attack, and how can you protect your business?
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are an increasingly common—and increasingly difficult to prevent—form of cybersecurity threat. When businesses first experience a DDOS attack, they frequently misdiagnose the situation as a down server or a failed application. This is because DDoS attacks target websites in a way that makes them look like the server is experiencing a high volume of traffic, coming from multiple sources. If the server can’t cope with the added volume, the website goes offline.
This can have disastrous effects for businesses. For major websites, even a few seconds of down time can result in a significant loss of revenue and a disruption of services. However, your business can take steps to mitigate this threat.
What can you do to safeguard your business?
Organizations should plan their response in advance, rather than waiting for an attack to occur. The first step is to make sure your network architecture is as diverse as possible. This will cut down on single points of failure, and make it harder to take down your site at once. To ensure diversity, make sure you use servers at disparate geographic locations, use different Internet providers at these locations, and cut down on any network bottlenecks.
Certain kinds of hardware can also help control a DDoS attack and protect your network resources. Firewalls can keep your network secure while routers spread incoming traffic across your servers to protect any of them from becoming overloaded.
You can also scale up your bandwidth to accommodate unexpected traffic surges. This can be useful if your website suddenly becomes newsworthy, but it also can allow you to ward off a DDoS threat. That said, DDoS attacks have grown steadily larger over the years. Last year, a particularly massive attack took down Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, and Spotify—among others.
Finally, you can work with other service companies to help filter or divert malicious DDoS traffic. These companies can monitor your traffic, spot a DDoS attack as it begins, and rout only safe traffic through to your server.
No plan is ironclad, but you can reduce your risk.
If Amazon can fall prey to a DDoS attack, so can you. But a good mitigation strategy can protect you from all but the most massive attacks, and it can help you reduce your down time once one is underway.
