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What is DDOS Attack and How Can You Protect Yourself from It?

Digitization is responsible for bringing certain risks mainly those linked with hacking attacks. They can also comprise of attaining confidential information, the entire network, taking over control of the computer, or cutting off approach to particular services.

As the amount of data on the internet increase, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks turn out to be common. You need to know that a denial of service attack is a nasty attempt to disturb the accessibility of a targeted system like a website to legitimate as well as users.

It is noticed that attackers usually generate a large volume of packets, devastating the target system. You need to understand that during Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the attacker makes use of numerous negotiated or controlled sources so that attack is generated.

Distributed Denial-of-Service or DDoS is considered a malicious attempt that blocks your business from its traffic. At the time of a DDoS attack, the target server is bombarded with bad traffic that exploited systems on the internet generate.

When a website is targeted by a DDoS attack, it might be unavailable for a while or even a long time as per the severity of the attack. Safeguarding your website against DDoS attacks simply means, you are executing a series of solutions to deal with fake traffic beforehand which is sent by hackers in order to destroy the resources of your server.

Keep one thing in your mind, DDoS attacks are dangerous for all sizes of businesses, small or big. Generally, DDoS hackers target:

  • Financial and fintech companies
  • Online retailers
  • Online gaming and gambling companies
  • Government units
  • IT service providers

Why DDoS attacks?

You must know that a DDoS attack is capable of targeting all types of websites or web applications. But the most common targets include online games, online services, e-commerce websites, VoIP infrastructures, banks & financial institutions as well as computer servers.

When it comes to DDoS attacks, there are several reasons. Some of them include:

  • To spread malware
  • Destruction of a website or webspace
  • To exhibit that the website or server is not protected from attacks
  • Hacking competition between penetration testers as well as hackers
  • To attain access to sensitive data unofficially
  • For political reasons
  • Make money by blackmailing the owner of the server
  • The hackers might be objecting against something or they want to get attention for themselves

Ways to protect yourself from DDoS attack

When it comes to getting protecting against DDoS attacks, there are several methods but below-stated are the most effective ones:

Virtual Private Network

A VPN is responsible to encrypt your internet connection and avoid malicious third parties from supervising your online activity or pilfering your information. The forged packets sent by the attacker generally include the IP address of the victim as the source IP address.

In order to effectively avoid DDoS attacks, you need to get a dedicated IP using VPN encryption that will not let the hackers see the websites you visit and also block them from knowing the online activities you indulge in.

Apart from this, VPNs can also offer an added layer of security that will further avoid hackers from controlling your computer remotely. If you wish to have a secure connection over a less secured network then VPN networking technology can help you.

You need to have server redundancy

Being dependent on numerous distributed servers often makes it hard for hackers to attack all the servers at the same time. In case, an attacker launches a DDoS on a single hosting device successfully, other servers might remain untouched and take on additional traffic unless the aimed system is back online.

To assure that you have any network bottlenecks, it is vital to host servers at data centers and colocation facilities in diverse regions. You can also even make utilization of a content delivery network (CDN).

Keep one thing in your mind, as DDoS attacks function by overloading a server, a CDN can equally share the load through numerous distributed servers.

Vulnerability assessment

One of the best and most operative ways of fighting a DDoS attack is understanding what you are up against. Vulnerability assessment is basically the procedure of testing the network for all kinds of latent vulnerabilities that can further cause great data loss.

Manually or with assessment software, you can conduct a vulnerability assessment.

Preparation for possible attacks

One of the best ways to fight against a DDoS attack is to get prepared for it beforehand and know how it can be spotted when it happens.

Therefore, DDoS attacks have increased with time as they are easy to put together when compared to before. But following the above-stated points can help you to get effective protection against DDoS attacks.