What is DDos and how will it affect me?

Featured article by Debbie Fletcher, Independent Technology Author

These days, it’s hard to imagine a world that’s not connected to the Internet in some way. High-speed connections and Wi-Fi have quite literally changed the way we live and while some may argue we are turning into a society of tech-crazed zombies, the potential of the Internet can’t be denied.

Communication links, for instance, have been greatly improved thanks to apps like Facebook and Viber, information is now easily accessible and with companies like 100 TB Business Web Hosting making it easier than ever to set up your own site there’s every reason to become a web-based entrepreneur. That said, with the highs come the lows so if you’re logging on it’s important to be aware of nasties such as scams, viruses and other kinds of malware.

DDos attacks

One thing to familiar yourself with is a DDos attack. DDoS strands for Distributed Denial of Service and is a type of DOS (denial of service) attack on a network that’s designed to bring it to its knees by flooding it with potential traffic. While this might sound completely malicious and pointless, there are programmers and hackers out there that strive to cause trouble online, so it’s worth knowing that not everything is always rosy.

Types of DDoS attacks

Hackers are always dreaming up new ways to harm systems and unfortunately there are many types of DDoS attacks that can cause significant damage. These include:

– Volume based attacks

During volume based attacks such as UDP floods, ICMP floods and other spoofed-packet floods, the attacker’s main goal is to saturate the bandwidth of the attacked site.

– Protocol attacks

This type of attack includes SYN floods, fragmented packet attacks, Ping of Death, Smurf DDoS and more and is designed to consume actual server resources or those of immediate communication equipment such as firewalls and load balancers.

– Application layer attacks

The attacks are carried out with the sole aim of crashing web servers. They tend to target Apache, Windows or OpenBSD and the magnitude is measured in requests per second.

How to protect yourself

Of course, DDoS attacks could have a damaging effect on your business, particularly if all your systems and computers crash as a result and no one can access your network. For this reason, it’s crucial to protect yourself against DDoS attacks in any way you can by provisioning for more traffic, installing systems that will alert you to an attack and to seek help from your web host or network providers.

DDos attacks are a downside to the Internet, but don’t let malware stop you from making the most of a connected world.