DDoS attack reports make headline news daily? Do you know what a DDoS attack is and how it can affect you? In this article we will explain what a DDoS attack is and how it can affect you.
So what does DDoS mean ? It is the acronym for Distributed Denial of Service attack on a computer network. In most cases targeting a particular website or group of websites.
What is DDoS attack on a website?
Imagine your local SPAR or Pick-a-Pay. A group of people crowding the entry will make it hard for legitimate customers to enter, disrupting or completely halting the trade. This in turn has a negative impact on the ability for the company to make profit. It also harms the reputation of the business as customers will end up going elsewhere.
The same thing happens with a DDoS attack. The perpetrator uses a network of computers to make incredibly large amounts of requests to a specific domain or network which hosts a particular domain. This effectively locks out everyone wishing to consume the resource legitimately. Furthermore it creates tremendous amounts of work for support staff of the affected website or network
Who performs a DDoS attack and to what end?
Individuals or groups responsible for Ddos Attacks are rarely identified, and even less likely to be prosecuted for their actions. Factors that contribute to this are mainly the technology and motive behind the attack.
DDoS attacks have been performed by lone individuals, disgruntled with a product or service and also large groups. Some for political, financial or commercial reasons.
The reality is that DDoS attacks come in all shapes and sizes. The most damaging DDoS attacks, which mix brute force (volumetric) attacks with targeted, application-specific attacks, have much the same frequency at 39%, as targeted at 42% and volumetric at 41% alone – Corero.com
DDoS attacks can form part of a larger conspiracy with a hidden goal or agenda. The most obvious reason is financial gain and therefore the most likely perpetrators are fraudsters.
A simple example would be, where a fraudster performs a DDoS attack on a financial service or trading website such as ice3x.com. The fraudster will perform the attack and then require a “ransom”, payable in crypto currency, from the company to stop the DDoS attacks…… they never do. {YOU SHOULD NEVER PAY OR EVEN REPLY TO SUCH RANSOM REQUESTS}
How DDoS attacks happen and what steps do iceCUBED take to mitigate this risk?
There are a range of techniques used to perform DDoS attacks which can be discussed at length, but that is not the intention of this article. If you would like to understand more about these techniques, to fully protect yourself, you can simply do a google search or find further information on the wiki page for DDoS attack techniques and related scams.
How do we mitigate the risk and defend against DDoS attacks?
- Using the industry leading DNS and CDN networks such as Cloudflare to mitigate risks from known and new potential threats.
- By vigorously monitoring network traffic constantly and have policies and procedures in place to quickly and effectively deal with any such event, resulting in minimum downtime (if any) for our traders .
- We follow industry standard best practice across all disciplines. This includes dedicated backup suites of all our systems and access to content distribution networks across multiple geographical locations.
A DDoS attack is almost always happening somewhere at any given time.
Bad actors will always try their luck and no interconnected system is immune to this.
This report is true, just looked at Netflow data. They’ve been hit by 7 large DDoS attacks across DNS, Chargen, NTP and LDAP protocols. https://t.co/xjXMQUJjR7
— Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) April 18, 2018
Recent DDoS attack research statistics from Corero
- 56% of respondents view DDoS as more of a concern in 2017 than it has been in the past
- 40% experience attacks on a monthly, or even weekly or daily basis
31% have experienced more attacks recently - 45% view loss of customer trust and confidence as most damaging effect to business
- 85% want their ISPs to take responsibility and provide additional security services to defeat DDoS
- 46% of those looking for upstream protection, would pay their providers for such a service
- 74% of those willing to pay, would spend up to 25% of their total ISP spend/budget to eliminate the problem via their ISP
- 58% continue to use homegrown or traditional security infrastructure to try and mitigate DDoS attacks
DDoS attacks happen everywhere online and this is usually untraceable due to the fact that it could be a prohibitively costly exercise. Attackers can use many layers to camouflage their actions.
The impact of these attacks are immediately evident. Furthermore the largest attacks seems to be politically motivated, suggesting that DDoS attacks may be part of governmental cyber warfare arsenals in some parts of the world.
The largest DDoS attack in history according to Forbes, was a result of political unrest as a part of Hong Kong’s Occupy Central protests. The attacked measured and incredible (at the time) 500Gbps and according to reports, was carried out against pro-democracy websites which included the independent news site Apple Daily as well as culture news site PopVote.
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