While expanding your business, you may encounter unfair competition or fraudsters who want to slow down your development. More often than not, DDoS attacks are used to degrade your company’s operations, which can reduce the performance of an application or website and lead to downtime of the entire production. The goal is to take out technical, financial, and reputational losses that allow your rival to dominate the market.
For now, we recommend that you look at the ddos protect your company, and we will tell you more about the essence of such actions of intruders.
How a DDoS attack works and who is targeted
The scammer or competitor needs to analyze the vulnerabilities found and develop a technique to exploit them. The process often begins with gathering detailed information about the future victim. Afterward, the user orders a DDoS attack from the attacker company and generates a large stream of malicious requests. Even if you manage to neutralize one episode, the probability of second and subsequent attacks is very high.
There may be several reasons:
Competition. The most popular reason. Your competitors may try to cause downtime for your company, resulting in losing important customers and deteriorating your reputation. Attempts to paralyze the system without strong protection can go on indefinitely;
Fraud. A dangerous type of attacker whose goal is to make a profit. They may try to steal your customer base, break your website for a recovery fee, or set up their blocks to steal new customer credentials;
Entertainment. Sometimes young hackers just have fun trying to mess with random websites or companies. Such attacks are easy to fend off and get back up and running because they have no commercial base.
Lack of DDoS protection results in financial and reputational losses, numerous complaints, and business relationships or existing contracts rupture. It also threatens the company with problems with users whose confidential data may be stolen. That is why experts recommend taking care right away to ensure that all information, the website, the application, and the company are protected as much as possible.
What DDoS attacks are
Specialists classify attacks according to the level of damage. There are three main types:
Network layer. The targets are network devices such as routers, routers, and switches. The protocol is most often IP, DVMRP, DDP, OSPF, IGMP, and others;
Transport layer. A dangerous type of DDoS attack that attacks servers and services. TCP, UDP, DCCP, and other protocols used;
Application level. Network services, applications, and websites can be targeted. In this case, HTTP, HTTPS, and DNS application protocols are dangerous.
The impact on the system can also differentiate attacks. Some try to achieve denial of service; others try to fill traffic with powerful requests to the brim. Still, others can hit the entire architecture of an application and destroy the logic of the operation, leading to the whole system being taken out of action.
How to defend against a DDoS attack
The primary measure is to prevent such attacks. In this case, you will need to buy protection in advance from a reliable service and pay for it on time. Once the attack is over, you will also need specialists who can carry out preventive measures for the databases and other directories of the system.
In addition to this, popular methods are:
Filtering. The method allows you to use special filters to immediately sift out suspicious traffic and arrange unexpected checks for the use of bots. Thanks to unique ACL lists or firewalls, it is possible to stop an attack;
Vulnerability mitigation. This method is more about threat prevention. The company hires specialists in advance who work with the system architecture and protocols, troubleshooting and conducting special crash tests;
System distribution. That is a method of distributing the capacity of your Internet service among different communication nodes. Even if some of them fail, the others will continue to work.
Using all three methods to fight competitors and intruders is most effective. Yet, in any case, we recommend that you turn to professionals and install reliable protection on your server or website. It is essential to business expansion that will save finances, reputation, and customers.
