Recent DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service Attacks) revealed that the smaller ones are more dangerous than powerful attacks that knock a company offline.
This is because it is now being used as a smokescreen to install malware or to steal important data.
According to a communications and analysis firm, DDoS “disrupts operations and distracts the security teams”, enabling the attacker to exfiltrate data and plant malicious software.
Because of this threat, major companies are setting up security and protective measures against DDoS attacks.
Reinforcing IT infrastructure
Protection should start from within, one way to do this is to make operating systems and applications more resilient to DDoS attacks.
Some attacks are designed for the application layer. This can be prevented by ensuring the right number of Apache worker threads are configured , or that there are enough nodes on a Linux server.
It would also help to use a reliable web hosting service to keep a web server or VPS well-protected from DDoS. Because the attack happens online, secure hosting is one layer of protection that companies should take advantage of.
Oversubscription of bandwidth
For a DDoS attack to be effective, they need to muster enough traffic to overwhelm a website’s bandwidth.
This means oversubscription is a fairly straightforward way to protect a company from DDoS. Not only that, it will help the company operate in a significantly larger capacity.
Use of automated DDoS mitigation tools
These days, there are many tools that companies used to monitor NetFlow data from routers and other sources.
The same tools are used to determine a baseline for traffic.
The addition of the DDoS mitigation tools, however, will monitor traffic patterns and counter any signs of attacks when patterns start to step out of its baseline.
The DDoS tool will attract traffic to them and then filter out noise.
They can detect volumetric attacks and even something as sinister as slowloris.
Blackholing UDP traffic
Some of the biggest DDoS attacks are reflected on DNS and NTP, or UDP traffic. Because the majority of businesses’ infrastructures are incapable of receiving UDP traffic, they are vulnerable to amplification attacks.
As a way to protect themselves, they filter UDP traffic by using a router blackholing.
Relying on third-party providers for redirects
To protect against a sustained attack, large organizations implement either a BGP-based service or a DNS-based redirect service.
This can be sourced through third-party providers.
Some security measures enable a company to stay online even when under attack of DDoS.
DDoS attack happens when multiple computers and Internet connections are used to flood a targeted system or resource, causing it to act erratically or go offline completely.
It has crippled the code-sharing site GitHub and CloudFlare, a provider of distributed domain name server and content delivery network services.
With mega DDoS attacks on the rise, it is only right for small to large companies to protect themselves.
Start by using a reliable and highly secure web hosting service, complete with tools that will keep a web server or VPS almost impregnable.
Use UrPad to host your website today.