Cyber Attack – How can you prevent a DDos affecting your business?

Cyber-attacks on companies are becoming more sophisticated by the year, and businesses are at more risk than ever before. In 2012 Robert S.Mueller boldly stated “There are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked and those that will be” a premonition which is quickly coming to fruition with the recent cyber-attacks.

One of the most common types of attack is Distributed Denial of Service (DDos), which doesn’t compromise your information or hacks into your system but instead overloads your network and takes you offline. Many recent DDos attacks have occurred on the likes of the BBC and the Irish national lottery. So what can you do to defend against it?

What is a DDoS attack?

DDoS stands for “Distributed Denial of Service” is a form of cyber-attack that works by overloading websites or other network services with any kind of online traffic. With enough force they can take an entire website down or even compromise a network provider’s ability to provide its clients with an internet connection. The typical methods that people use to perform these attacks are usually automated bots or programmes, which can keep up the attack for as long as the culprits deem necessary.

Why do people perform DDoS attacks on companies and websites?

There has been a multitude of reasons for these DDoS attacks, but in recent years these attacks have become more sophisticated in both its use and in its execution. An example of this is DD4BC, an extortionist group that uses DDoS attacks to blackmail business’s to transfer money via bitcoin, or it won’t relent in its attack. By exploiting weaknesses in certain company’s network infrastructure, they are able to stop all traffic to a business’s website, which can potentially cripple businesses who rely on their website for new business.

Other reasons can of course be political or an ideological view, where certain websites are tackled to prevent the spreading of opinion. The least malicious reason, and a sign that shows how common and petty DDoS attacks can be, is just because people can. This of course has been made exponentially easier by groups such as lizard squad; who were responsible for bringing the Sony servers down during Christmas, that opened a website freely offering their services to DDoS websites for a small fee. Free accessibility such as this surely raises security concerns for any business.

What can you do to protect your business from a DDos attack?

As mentioned before DDoS attacks are becoming more advanced as people are researching and finding weaknesses to exploit before unleashing mayhem. So what can you do to protect yourself?

One of the simplest ways of protecting yourself from a DDoS attack is to monitor the traffic on your network, so you can see if there are any malicious connections that may compromise your system. This allows you to block their connection, and proactively stop an attack before it has any affect. Another consideration is to overprovision on your bandwidth by a high percentage, as it allows you more time before the DDoS attack overwhelms your site and forces it to be down.  However for larger networks, monitoring these connections with an advanced team of administrators isn’t going to be enough, as the system will simply be too vast to constantly monitor for anomalies.

What you will need in this circumstance is a professional group of Pen testers to examine the intricacies of your system, and find vulnerabilities that a Cyber attacker could exploit. The reason for this is that it is not just your network that can be overloaded by a DDoS attack, but you can also have your software manipulated which can allow another angle of attack to any potential Cyber Attacker.

If you want to know more about how to keep your business safe, or would like advice on pen testing services, why not give Southbank a call?