Every business in today’s digital world operates online, as it has the fastest potential to reach its audience. But do you know the other side of this story? Cyberattacks are finding vulnerabilities in these online systems.
Thus, there is an emergence of different types of threats, amongst which DDoS attacks stand as the common one. DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service Attack. To explain in simple terms, DDoS attacks occur when malicious actors target websites and servers by flooding them with illegitimate traffic, aiming to disrupt the entire service's availability.
Let’s gain a better understanding of DDoS attacks in this short guide. We’ve also elaborated on the causes, types, and preventive measures to avoid cyber threats.
With no further ado, we’ll head over!
The Gist of DDoS Attack
To make the understanding easier, let’s take an example: Say you’re traveling to a city for vacation, and suddenly there's a road jam in between. Meaning, you find no way to go in and out. A DDoS attack works similarly. As mentioned above, it targets websites and servers, rendering them inaccessible through fake traffic that disrupts their entire functionality.
These attacks are impacting a wide range of industries, including e-commerce, gaming, and more. Alongside DDoS attacks, ransomware is the most common form of cyber threats today that can negatively impact your business.
Types of DDoS Attacks
The following are some of the types of DDoS attacks:
- Volumetric attacks: These attacks aim to saturate the target's bandwidth.
- Protocol attacks: These types of attacks primarily target the infrastructure by identifying weaknesses in protocols, such as TCP/IP.
- Application layer: These attacks are highly sophisticated and disrupt the entire service. For example, HTTP floods mimic legitimate user behavior, making them challenging to detect.
How to Identify a DDoS Attack?
Different signs can help you identify a DDoS attack. Here we’ve listed a few:
- Your website suddenly stops working or is slow.
- A high volume of traffic is arriving from the same IP address.
- The traffic from a particular location or device type begins to increase.
- Unexpected timeout errors
- Log monitoring can also help in
Likewise, there are many more causes of the DDoS attack. Even though you cannot avoid them, checking them in the first place can help you avoid severe damage.
How Can You Prevent DDoS Attacks?
It’s better to be prepared than to take action late. The following are some of the key preventive measures that help you mitigate DDoS attacks:
- Make sure your software and OS are updated. This can mitigate the risks of attackers sending traffic to your website with ease.
- Prepare a denial-of-service defense strategy. In short, an action plan that can help to detect, prevent, and reduce DDoS attacks.
- Train your team on the incident response plan in the event of any incident.
- Keep your infrastructure ready to handle sudden traffic surges. Adding bandwidth cannot be the best solution. Instead, start utilizing CDN services. They use a global network and redundant resources to handle traffic spikes.
How is the Effect on Service Availability
A DDoS attack aims to disrupt the service availability. It could mean the following:
Downtime: Websites and apps go offline, resulting in financial losses and frustrated customers.
Damaged Reputation: Consumers do not trust the brands that can’t maintain uptime.
Loss of Operations: Internal systems face interruption, and business operations cease.
The Final Lines
DDoS assaults pose a serious threat to the stability of the internet; they are more than just a disruption. Understanding the principles of DDoS attacks and their impact on service availability is the first step in creating robust systems.
Businesses can take the required precautions to safeguard their operations and ensure uninterrupted user access through proactive monitoring, strategic defenses, and instructional initiatives.
Stay tuned with all the latest blogs around the cybersecurity landscape, right here!
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