How DDoS Attacks Affect Your Business

In the world wide web, many potential security issues may arise. One of these types of cyberattacks is a Distributed Denial of Service, also known as a DDoS attack. A DDoS attack happens when an aggressor gains control of a network of connected, online machines by infecting them with malware. By infecting them with malware, each one is turned into a bot. The attacker, then having control over these bot groups (“botnet”), can then carry out DDoS attacks. The attacker does this by directing the bots, sending updated instructions via remote control. When a victim’s IP address is identified, each bot will send requests to the target, which will potentially cause the victim’s server or network capacity to overflow. When the network is overflowing with automated traffic, what results is a denial-of-normal service to normal traffic. This keeps people that are wanted from being able to connect to you. DDoS attacks can be separated into three different attack categories: Application Layer, Protocol and Volumetric.

• Application Layer: The goal of this strategy is to exhaust the resources of the target. The attack targets the layer where webpages are generated on the server and delivered in response to https requests.
• Protocol: Also known as a state-exhaustion attack, this technique causes a service disruption by consuming all the available state table capacity of web application servers, or intermediate resources like firewalls and load balancers.
• Volumetric: This category of attacks attempts to create congestion by consuming all available bandwidth between the target and the larger internet.

When a DDoS attack strikes, one solution available to all network administrators is to create a blackhole route and funnel traffic into that route. What that means is, when blackhole filtering is implemented without specific restriction criteria, both malicious and legitimate network traffic is routed to a “null” route and dropped from the network. If an Internet property is experiencing a DDoS attack, the property’s Internet service provider might send all of the site’s traffic into the black hole as a defense. In the vast universe of the internet, there are many possibilities for those who may wish to disrupt online life and business. By aligning with a security company that understands the potentials, and how to best prevent and resolve them, one can find a great amount of continued, secure enjoyment of the web.