Have you ever attempted to purchase tickets for a significant event only to find that the seller's website has crashed due to the overwhelming traffic from thousands of individuals trying to access the site simultaneously?
The website often experiences a temporary outage because the server is incapable of handling the surge in traffic. Criminal Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks exploit the same principle.
When a DDoS attack targets a business, it inundates the system with internet traffic to overload it and cause it to malfunction, making it unavailable to the business and its customers. This could result in a brief disruption or something more severe. Last year, DDoS attacks lasted an average of 50 minutes.
While this may not seem like a significant period, it is sufficient to cause customer dissatisfaction and halt business operations, resulting in significant downtime costs.
Unfortunately, DDoS attacks are not only becoming more frequent, but they are also becoming more extensive, more sophisticated, and more prolonged. The largest, recently reported attack was sending 71 million requests per second to the target's servers at its peak, surpassing the previous record of 46 million requests per second.
Moreover, an increasing number of businesses are reporting being targeted by DDoS attacks where criminals demand large ransoms to stop the attack.
What does this mean for you?
It is critical to ensure that all of your security measures are current and functioning as intended. Are your firewalls equipped with DDoS monitoring and prevention tools? And is your team aware of the significance of remaining vigilant?
We can assist in safeguarding your business, contact us today.
Percy Macdonald
Compared to other forms of cyber attack it seems like DDoS can happen without any real fault or human error on the victims part. Seems almost like a ‘lazy’ attack method.