Some readers may already be wondering, “What exactly is DDoS and why should I worry about it?” DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service – and a DDoS attack is when a person (or group) acts maliciously and uses a program which has a sole purpose of flooding a server with traffic.
Why would someone do this? There are many reasons one would execute this devastating attack. For instance, you run a news website. You publish an article that this person doesn’t agree with. They, in turn, run their malicious program. It sends thousands upon thousands of page requests (unique requests to open the website), which causes more traffic than your server can handle.
Your server crashes from the load and no one is able to view your site. Of course, this could be one reason among an infinite amount. For whatever evil agenda they have, it does not fare well for those on the affected side.
In 2015 alone, there were some 50,146 attacks that were detected – averaging 137 per day and 5 per hour (Newswire, 2016).
While these attacks may not make national news or headlines, the IT world is paying close attention. With more devices and easier programs to use, almost anyone could be on the bad side of the cyber war.
One of the more recent attacks that happened was on New Year’s Eve. A group calling themselves New World Hacking took down BBC’s global site and Donald Trump’s site. Another big attack was aimed at a big part of the Internet itself. Namely, the 13 DNS servers on the backbone of the Internet.
These servers are important because they translate the words we use (such as website addresses) into the numerical equivalent that the machines understand. There were two separate attempts, one being 160 minutes long and another lasting about an hour. It caused three of the DNS servers to go offline for a couple hours or so, which is enough to cause a lot of slowness issues or DNS errors on a lot of people’s screens.
What can be done to help mitigate this issue? There are a few things. You definitely should have an IT department or IT security group who is able to handle this. Bigger corporations especially should be keeping up with threat trends and keeping their firewalls and security prevention up to date and active.
Now, say you’re a small to medium size business and you have no security on your network. It would be a good idea to have an IT service provider such as Tech Experts to help with your IT and security needs. These days, especially in recent years, it’s not a good idea to just pay your cousin under the table to install a router and call it good.
If you can’t afford to have anything happen to your data or to be down for a day or more, hire a professional. We can set you up with a network designed with your needs and security in mind.