Take Adequate DDoS Protection Measures for Safeguarding Your Business from Attackers
Distributed Denial of Service attacks have emerged as a pressing problem for website owners and internet marketers. This is because such attacks not only disturb and hamper their online presence but also trigger huge losses often resulting in financial drainage. The main intention of a ddos attack is to make the resource of a computer unavailable and inaccessible to its users. Since its repercussions can be far-reaching and often catastrophic, it is important to take precautionary measures so that such onslaught of hackers can be avoided.
Let us consider some options through which ddos protection can be facilitated:
Evaluation of Risk: Just having a website or online presence does not make you vulnerable to these attacks. The extent of your dependence on the web determines whether you should at all invest in establishing a Distributed Denial of Service defense system. A company primarily generating revenue from several bricks-and-mortar retail stores and also having a web presence need not get so panicky about hackers and attackers.
However, if internet is the only place where you operate, you do need to give it a serious thought. Businesses or organizations having high public profiles or association with controversial issues are more likely to become victims of such attacks. In that case, you would require a comprehensive and thoroughly objective risk assessment.
Knowledge of Your System: One common aspect about the different types of ddos attack is the practice of flooding the targeted computer with a truckload of information. So how can you sense you are on the threshold of such an attack? It can be recognized by being aware of your normal baseline system activity or what is typical of your organization.
You need to monitor and record the activity of your server application and network traffic over a considerable period of time say, at least, a year. This will give you a good understanding of what is normal activity for your enterprise. You also need to correlate this information with happenings such as news events, product launches and other such occurrences so that you are also aware how much your system activity increases or decreases on such occasions. All this is important because it would give you the knowledge to identify any anomaly or inconsistency in your server activity.
Hardware Defense: Monitoring can help only to a certain extent. But, in order to shield yourself from such assaults, you would require certain structural and hardware defenses for adequate ddos protection. For instance, you can configure your network hardware in such a manner that Ping, SYN/ACK, Smurf or Fraggle and other such network flood attacks can be prevented easily. The Internet traffic characterizing these kinds of attacks can be restricted or rejected altogether. Again, you can use access control lists that are hardware-implemented for filtering out traffic from attacking computers.
Reporting: If your business has already been a victim of a Distributed Denial of Service attack, it is advisable to forensically preserve your system logs and documentation related to them so that it can possibly lead to the attacker being nailed and prosecuted.