What Does DDoS Mean? How to Prevent DDoS Attack

Being secure on the internet is so difficult that it is now becoming an aspiration. For every website, the need of having a secure website is increasing more than anything else. Day after day, more and more cases are emerging of cyber crime. Many businesses have lost their credibility, their clients and are unable to retain the customer because of being attacked online through a cyber attack.

Websites are vulnerable to different attacks which are attempted at extracting sensitive data from the website or at bringing down these website. To bring down the website, the DDoS attack is one of the strongest tools used by the the attackers to bring down the website. The DDoS attack, The Distributed Denial of Services attack is an attack aimed to crash the server and make the website inoperative.

This attack harms the business to a great extent and thus needs to be prevented. There are many DDoS protection techniques which can be implemented and thus least damage can be incurred by the websites.  

Let us understand what a DDoS attack and how it is made:

The Distributed denial of service attack is an attack that is made on the website which miss directs the website traffic to a page that generates an error instead of the actual website. The genuine traffic instead of gaining access to the website is rendered pathless while the traffic on the website is illicit and is only fake.

The DDoS attack intends to make the server and the website unavailable to the legitimate users. When this is achieved the effect reflects directly on the customer base and the business. The impact of the DDoS attack can last between a few weeks to few months.

How the DDoS attack happens:

The cyber attacker floods the website with alot of traffic on the website. The server tries to answer the requests of all the visitors to the website but as the users are illegitimate, it is only wasting its resources. Thus when a genuine user is on the website he gets delayed service and sometimes is also timed out.

A huge damage to the website is made when the website sees a sudden spike in traffic and when the server is unable to render services to all of these users, the server crashes. It takes several days even months to recover from a server crash. This means that for all the days the server is unavailable, all the users will be denied service to the website.

Imagine the plight suffered by E-commerce or a banking website when attacked by DDoS. DDoS protection is thus must for such websites. There are several vendors several cyber security plans that include DDoS protection as a feature. Although you can engage with one of the website security plans, there are a few ways you can be careful at your end. Here are some tips for the same:

Monitor your traffic: Having increasing number of visitors to your website is always a good sign, but you need to analyse whether the traffic is gaining gradually or suddenly.Whether it is an outcome of a marketing campaign or you get got lucky. If there is an unexpected and unexplained traffic, you need to delve deep into the reason and monitor the visitors to your website.

Analyse the traffic: Once you have found that the traffic to your website is abnormal, you need to find some data points like, the IP address of the users, the geographical region of the visitors, the time spent per user on the website, and the frequency of requests made to the website by the user. A pattern can be observed and you can then stop providing services to this particular set of traffic.

Consult a third party: When you observe the traffic increase and sense something fishy, the immediate action should be to take the problem to a team of DDoS mitigation. The experts have a plan of action that they can begin executing as soon as the threat can is sensed.

Create and test a DDoS prevention and mitigation plan: You can have a defined DDoS prevention plan pre designed. Having a team at your end that monitors the traffic and also knows what is to be done when a DDoS attack is evident is the best strategy you can have. You can have a firewall protection that provides protection against DDoS. You can have dry runs to test your infrastructure to be assured of your website security against DDoS.

A DDoS attack is unavoidable but you can surely reduce the impact of the assault by take the above measures. It is always advisable to be protected than to regret the attack. A combat mode is better than a defense mode to save your business and your brand.