How to Prevent DDoS Attacks in Your Company?

There are several methods by which malicious agents attack websites and destabilize network services and resources. One of the most widely used techniques is the DDoS attack, which means distributed denial-of-service.

Through this attack, a website ends up becoming inoperable and overloaded with malicious traffic. However, DDoS attacks can also be made against all types of network resources, such as virtual applications, data centers, enterprise servers, and APIs.

Traffic overload can cause a variety of problems for your company, from bottlenecks in accessing important data to the unavailability of all digital tools in the corporation. Therefore, it is important to be attentive and know how to prevent DDoS attacks.

There are several ways to prevent DDoS attacks on your company servers. In this text, we will explain in more detail what DDoS attacks are and how they can affect your business. Moreover, we will show you how to prevent DDoS attacks on your company. 

To make our article clearer, we divided our content into topics. These are:

• What Are DDoS Attacks?
• How Can DDoS Attacks Affect Your Business?
• How to Prevent DDoS Attacks?
• About senhasegura
• Conclusion

Enjoy the read!

What Are DDoS Attacks?

Before specifying what DDoS attacks are and how to avoid them, we must understand what DoS (denial-of-service) attacks are in general.

A DoS attack is a way of rendering a network resource unusable. The attack is usually carried out with a traffic overload, directing a series of superfluous requests to render the website unusable.

Through these malicious requests, the system ends up being overloaded and unable to process legitimate requests.

In the DDoS attack, the traffic maliciously directed to the resource comes from several sources. By multiplying the source of the attack, the method makes it impossible to avoid overloading by blocking a single source.

DDoS attacks are often used as a criminal mechanism. By making the system unusable, hackers can blackmail large organizations, so it is important to know how to prevent DDoS attacks. 

There are numerous techniques for performing a DDoS attack. The simplest way to do this type of attack is through a specialized tool, such as Slowloris or Stacheldraht. This type of tool is included in several types of malware and can carry out an attack without the knowledge of the system administrator.

The best way to understand an attack like this is through the following metaphor: imagine a group of people crowding into a shop entrance, preventing access to legitimate consumers. In this way, the store itself becomes inaccessible.

How Can DDoS Attacks Affect Your Business?

DDoS attacks are intended to make legitimate use of websites and web resources in general unavailable. Thus, the attacker is able to disrupt the activity of the attacked organization.

The main targets of these attacks are online services that we use frequently and contain sensitive data, such as internet banking, media, educational tools, medical management systems, e-commerce, etc.

The motivations behind attackers vary. Different groups have different reasons for carrying out DDoS attacks.

Attacks are sometimes carried out as a form of political activism. When government agencies are the victims, the agents generally seek to cause some type of economic or social instability.

In the case of massive attacks organized by large groups, DDoS can be used as a distraction tactic, directing the attention of authorities and technical teams to smaller attacks.

In other cases, the motivations may be strictly financial. For example, a malicious competitor could order a DDoS attack to make its service more attractive to consumers.

Or, more directly, the attacker can use the DDoS attack to extort a company and gain illicit profits.

In these cases, the malicious agent produces an attack to disable some digital service and charges a ransom to return the system to normality. These are the attacks known as RDDoS (ransom distributed denial-of-service).

Another tactic is to just threaten the organization with an attack. To convince the company to pay the ransom, the attacker can make an attack demonstration, a “sneak peek”, proving its disruptive capacity and thus increasing their chances of profiting from the fear and panic produced, especially in people who do not even imagine how to prevent DDoS attacks. 

Unfortunately, the company does not always have an adequate protection system. Furthermore, contacting law enforcement authorities can be a time-consuming solution and cause even more trouble with invaders.

Most of the time, hackers are not even tracked because they use cryptocurrency wallets to receive ransoms.

Besides, there is a whole lot of calculation to be done in the event of ransomware attacks. In fact, the answer to the simple question “should I or should I not pay the ransom?” may be more complicated than you think. 

The consequences of a DDoS attack can be disastrous. The instability of internal systems, for example, can make the production process more expensive or even totally hindered. On the other hand, the unavailability of websites accessed by the public can make it impossible to attract customers and make sales.

How to Prevent DDoS Attacks?

However, the development of DDoS attacks has also given rise to a number of defense techniques.

In fact, there is a way to know how to prevent DDoS attacks. Defenses against these attacks involve a combination of detection technologies, traffic classification, and response tools.

Basically, the goal is to block traffic identified as malicious and only allow traffic classified as legitimate.

About senhasegura

We, from senhasegura, are a company specializing in digital security. Through our services, we seek to give companies sovereignty over their actions and privileged information.

Our job is to fight corporate cyberattacks and data theft by protecting one company from others who track the actions of network administrators, databases, and internal servers through an integrated PAM solution. 

We also work to comply with demanding audit requirements and other standards, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Conclusion

By reading this article, you saw that:

• A DDoS attack consists of distributed denial-of-service;
• These DDoS attacks can be made against websites and all types of network resources;
• The attack is usually performed with a traffic overload;
• In the DDoS attack, the traffic maliciously directed to the resource comes from several sources;
• There are numerous techniques for performing a DDoS attack and the attackers’ motivations are also varied;
• DDoS attacks allow attackers to disrupt an organization’s operations. Hence the importance of knowing how to prevent DDoS attacks;
• To prevent DDoS attacks, it is necessary to combine detection technologies, traffic classification, and response tools.