Successfully Secure Yourself from DDoS Attacks- Stop Being a Victim
The latest to the bandwagon of cyber attacks after threats like phishing, data leakage, website defacement, legal risks etc., is the Distributed Denial-of-Service, or more commonly known as – DDoS. It is an organized attack that renders a service unusable or unavailable to its users – temporarily or indefinitely. More specifically, a DDoS attack is a form of protest by a person or an organization against what is called ‘Censorship’ of the internet. Typically, the most common targets for DDoS attack are the sites or services hosted on web servers of banks, third party payment gateways, e-commerce portals, social media portals and even root name servers.
A recent survey from McAfee states that 80% of respondents, who represented different organizations across the world said that they have faced a DDoS attack.35% of respondents see 10 or more attacks per month compared to 18% in 2009. A hackers group called ‘Anonymous’ has been responsible for a number of DDoS attacks on various websites and servers.
The attack leaves organizations with a long term reputational loss apart from financial loss and at times permanent business disability. The most common way of attack is, to overload the server, router or the network link, thereby compromising the bandwidth. Herein, the server sends large volumes of traffic, leading to processing of illegitimate requests instead of servicing legitimate ones, thus congesting the bandwidth and at times leading to system crash.
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, because of their nature and execution are very difficult to identify in their early stages. Early detection of a DDoS attack is critical to reduce its impact. To curtail these attacks, organizations today need industry leading DDoS Network Security Solution, aided by scrubbing centers that can handle most complex DDoS attacks with zero downtime for the client.
However, managing such an infrastructure not only requires extensive expenditures but also the dedication of precious resources for running and maintenance. It is for this reason that organizations turn to external vendors who provide DDoS security services that are efficient, reliable and cost-effective.
Business verification process provided in DDoS solution ensures free flow of legitimate traffic and diverts illegitimate traffic to “scrubbing center”. These scrubbing centers make sure that all the illegitimate traffic is filtered and only clean and genuine traffic passes through. The identified malicious traffic goes to the Null zone where it is terminated. This ensures that the attack gets controlled and only legitimate traffic reaches out to the server.
Market trends show that demand for outsourced DDoS solutions to fight these DDoS attacks is growing. Organizations are looking for external partners to meet their security needs and the cloud is becoming crowded with new vendors that are fast emerging to offer these services.