DDos attacks and how to prevent them: Network security.

DDos attacks are one of the most notorious attacks in computing. Having an effective network security method is the key to their prevention.

Over time, cyber-attacks or DDos attacks (Denial of Service) have gone through many stages and evolutions and although today they no longer represent a major risk to our security; this type of attack has caused many inconveniences to individuals and companies; especially in sites located on high-profile web servers, such as banks.

Likewise, although Dos and DDos attacks seem today to be a harmless threat and incapable of causing real damage to servers: technological advances have led to the appearance of new threats such as PDos and TDos, capable of not only causing real damage; but also permanent damage to hosts and rendering devices unusable. It is therefore important to have a cybersecurity system that helps us to prevent all these threats.

Dos and DDos attacks

Denial-of-service (DOS) and distributed denial-of-service (DDos) attacks are a type of cyberattack in which the perpetrator attempts to crash a host or server, usually public; that is, an attempt is made to make a computer or network resource unavailable to users who should have access to it; so instead the target machine or resource is flooded with excessive requests; thereby overloading the system and denying access to users who are actually trying to access the network.

Most of these attacks are of a temporary nature; but some attacks can also affect the servers of a network indefinitely and often the attacker or attackers are organized and by effectively carrying out the attack they can saturate the victim’s computers or servers.

In the case of a DDos attack, an attack is generated to the victim’s server similar to attack Two; in this case the traffic that crowds the target comes from different sources; this makes it more difficult to trace the origin and also makes it almost impossible to stop; this because it is usually fought individually with the sources that originate the attack.

Attack Types Two

Throughout history, numerous varieties of denial of service attacks have been developed, although some of them seem harmless nowadays; there are also varieties of attacks that can even achieve permanent damage to web pages; among the most outstanding ones are:

DDos: Distributed denial of service attacks are one of the best known and occur when the bandwidth of a target resource or system is collapsed from different sources.
Application Layer: This is in type of DDos attack in which they engage in application layer processes; such as attacking specific functions of some website with the aim of disabling them.
Denial of service as a service: This attack is developed using some of the tools offered by the websites themselves, which are known as “Booters” or “Stressers”.
PDos: Known as permanent denial of service attacks, they represent today one of the most exponential risks to network security and this is due to the damage that can be caused even to the hardware of the equipment.
TDos: Denial of Service attacks are one of the most recent and advanced attacks of this type, in which attackers can cause legitimate users to lose access to the main data network by flooding it with access requests.

Major Two and DDos Attacks

DDos attacks can come from many sources and for various reasons, from competitors of the same type of website, to people motivated by political reasons or by the nature of the content. In history there have been numerous attacks on all types of pages, servers and even applications; however, among the best known are:

Hong Kong Telegram: During 2019, in the context of the protests in Hong Kong; the social network telegram reported a crash in its servers coming from a DDos attack.
Code Red: In 2001, the White House reported an unprecedented incident in which multiple servers were affected by a DDos attack and the computer worm known as Code Red.
DynDNS: This was a massive attack in 2016; which was one of the best known and shocking in the entire internet; mainly for leaving without access to many web pages after attacking Dyn DNS one of the most used servers.
Wikipedia down: In 2019 just like Telegram, the Wikipedia platform went viral because its users started reporting that they had no access to the information portal; this due to a DDOS Attack in Germany and other areas of Europe.

How to prevent them

For many people and especially for the business sector, Dos and DDos attacks are still a threat to their systems today; therefore, it is important that you can develop an efficient strategy that allows you to prevent all these types of threats.

The most efficient way to foresee this type of attacks is to have a good cybersecurity system and mainly the hosting server. Depending on the site where we host our web page; we will have more or less possibilities of being victims of a DDos attack.

Each site container has its own security system and the more recognized is the site where we store our page is more likely to be less vulnerable to have this type of inconvenience. Among the best known sites are: Kinsta, Cloudflare, Sucuri and others. Similarly; there are also tools such as Akamai that help mitigate all these types of attacks.

Finally, one of the best ways to prevent these threats is through knowledge; the more information we know about the origin and operation is less likely that we can be victims; so it is always advisable to have updated information about the latest threats and their prevention; So if we have this plus a defense system and advanced cybersecurity we can be confident in the sustainability of our company.