DDoS attacks have recently been very damaging to both small and large businesses. According to studies, the resulting consequences of DDoS attacks can price companies between $120,000 and $2,000,000. Thus, it is necessary for all business owners to understand not only what DDoS attacks are, but also why they occur and how to resist them.
Definition of DDoS attacks and how does ddosing work
A DDoS attack is a hacker’s malicious action on a website that blocks business traffic and denies users entrance to the site. Criminals usually generate a large variety of packets or requests that restart the site. That is, if your site is attacked, it becomes non-functional for a short or even long time. The time depends on the intensity of the attacks and the preparation of the site for such a negative impact.
Hackers can carry out DDoS attacks in various forms, for example, create a stream of emails to many users, or create botnets and carry out artificial saturated traffic to the site, which blocks its performance.
There are two main types of DDoS attacks: bulk and app attacks.
- Volumetric attacks involve sending a large amount of unwanted data to a specific IP address so that the Internet connection cannot accept so many requests.
- App attacks destroy the site’s IT resources, such as memory or computing power. This is a very dangerous type of threat. It is hardly identifiable, because the hackers’ actions resemble typical user actions.
Main types of DDoS attacks
To understand how to deal with DDoS attacks, you need to clearly understand their types. This will help you understand what threat you are facing and how to resist it. Let’s consider the main types of DDoS attacks.
- HTTP flood. This type of ddos attack assumes submitting a large number of HTTP requests to overload the site and make it unavailable for user interaction. Thus, the attacker has a great chance to saturate the victim’s bandwidth and cause a denial of service. To ensure that the corresponding packets do not cause a denial of service for the attacker, he replaces his network address with the addresses of nodes in the network.
- Slowloris. During this attack, a massive amount of connections to the service are opened, but no data is sent.
- Session hijacking. This attack involves capturing the current session between two systems. It works as follows – a user logs into an account, and another uses it to log in later. Thus, the attacker receives information and can make changes to the system without the user’s knowledge.
- CSRF stands for cross-site request forgery. CSRF attack is aimed at sending malicious links to users or forging official links. That is, the user clicks on a link that takes him to another fraudulent site and performs fraudulent actions to obtain confidential data.
Prevention of ddos attacks
See the ways that are considered the best protection against DDoS attacks.
1. Increase bandwidth. It is very important to prepare a large bandwidth that can handle a large amount of traffic and the amount of requests that can be caused by hacker attacks. But it is important to remember that this method does not protect your resource 100%, but only complicates the possibility of an attack by hackers.
2. Using CDN solutions. Such solutions have a large number of features that can protect the site from DDoS attacks, and also offer SSL certificates. When you add your website to these service providers, by default it provides DDoS protection to mitigate attacks on your server network and app.
3. Using a VPN. Using VPN services blocks your Internet connection and thus prevents hackers from tracking your online activities or obtaining confidential information.
4. Vulnerability testing. Qualitatively conducted vulnerability testing of the site will help to identify weaknesses and prevent hacker attacks. You can perform testing both manually and with the help of special software.
We have considered the most popular ways to protect against DDoS attacks, as well as their definition. Finally, we want to note that it is very important to always optimize the site and check for vulnerabilities that can be used by hackers.
