29th December, 2012
3 Min read
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A couple of milliseconds delay of your page load time can cause a significant loss of revenue. We have explained this in length, recently. What about a complete stop to all of your website functions? For hours, days, weeks? Such attacks on websites, especially those websites that deal with payment, business transactions or transfer of personal data, are becoming more and more frequent. They are known as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack means that the attacker/hacker is choosing one computer system as a master system to control sometimes as many as hundreds of thousands other computer systems, known as zombies or bots. They all work with a uniform goal of flooding the targeted host with as many communication packets as possible to stop the website from working. Entirely.
As an online vendor, you are not only under the threat of being flooded with the denial-of-service packets, but also of being used as a zombie machine to perform such attacks.
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Not even giants are immune to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Yahoo! was inaccessible for 3 hours in 2000, and the revenue lost was estimated to about $500,000. In the same year, Amazon was down for 10 hours, with a loss estimated to $600,000. The attacks in the past were not avoided by CIA, or even The Pirate Bay. Each time, the attacks have not only affected businesses, but also individuals, trading companies, file sharers and end-customers.
DDoS attacks are one of the biggest threats to the security on the Internet, since the users of controlled computer systems are usually not aware of the attack performed. And since packets are not coming from a single source, they can not be stopped by simply blocking a single IP address.
Not that using one method of prevention alone can actually protect you. However, by using a combination of a few, you have a better chance of defending your business space. Or, to walk you through defense strategies:
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