DDoS attacks can be considered the most devastating hacker attacks. They vary in scale, but the attack itself always means a halt to normal operation. There is a risk of losing customers if you run any kind of online business.
As is well known, attacks target not only commercial websites but also the routers of large enterprises in order to block access to information.
How does a DDoS attack work?
DoS means taking a server out of service; DDoS is a method of sending malformed requests to bring down online services. The attacks are carried out through users' computers, in particular via a Trojan virus that does not reveal itself right away. Everything happens as in the myth of the ancient Greek ruse: when the number of infected computers reaches the required level, a program is triggered, and on its command every user's computer starts sending thousands of requests to the website, and thus to the server. The engine cannot keep up with such an enormous number of requests and technically becomes non-viable.
Types of DDoS attacks
Depending on the level of penetration, the most quickly recognizable are attacks at the network and transport layers, or, broadly speaking, the infrastructure level. This type is characterized by UDP and ICMP traffic floods aimed at overloading the network bandwidth or the server itself.
Application-layer attacks are the most dangerous, since the attack can be launched from a single computer and the traffic will not be flagged by defense systems. Known types: HTTP, GET/POST, targeting Apache, Windows, OpenBsd.
How to protect yourself from DDoS attacks?
To avoid the cost of restoring the server, during an attack many try to change the domain name and IP address in order to stop the heavy flow of requests. This puts your site's reputation and customer loyalty at risk. Mitigating network security threats is possible with multi-layered protection:
- Prevention: investigating the causes of attacks and responding to them in time. A big advantage goes to owners with a traffic anomaly detection system, which prevents colossal losses much faster
- User security: changing passwords regularly and using complex passwords reduces the chance of a DDoS attack and protects against break-ins
- PHP scripts: block IP addresses based on analysis when a particular request is repeated multiple times (effective for small attacks)
- Traffic filtering: anti-spam applications can filter out most of the flood, but they require manual configuration
- A firewall, VPN, load balancing and other types of protection each block DDoS attacks at their own level, which amounts to system-wide protection.
Buying specialized hardware helps detect malicious traffic before requests reach the router and server. But these devices require specialized knowledge to operate, need updates to keep the protection current, and only cope with small attacks limited by network capacity. And if you increase the bandwidth, you will have to overpay on a permanent basis.
Internet provider services can be a cost-effective solution, offering DDoS protection with high bandwidth. But more often they are not interested in updating their protection systems, since these systems require large investments.
A hosting provider (for example, us at master-server.pro) is quite a good solution in the fight against DDoS attacks. Having dedicated servers in data centers with huge integrated bandwidth and dedicated resources used for protection makes the price of the service affordable. Understanding their responsibility to their customers, data center specialists conduct research to detect new attack tactics. With their large capacity, they act as an intermediary between the user and the malicious traffic, absorbing and filtering out everything unnecessary that reaches the server. The IP address itself is also given multi-layered protection, which strengthens the security of your websites.
For the stable operation of your business and its steady growth, the security of your customers and your service is essential to running it successfully. We recommend that our clients rent a server with DDoS protection from us, in this data center.