DDoS Attack – A sudden influx of a large amount of traffic to a website, caused by a hacker, is known as a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack.
Example:
If a website usually receives 10,000 visits per day and suddenly starts receiving 1 million visits the next day, it can be understood that the website is experiencing a DDoS attack.
How does a DDoS Attack occur?
A hacker uses software to initiate a DDoS attack on a popular website. As a result, the website becomes overloaded and may be temporarily shut down.
How to prevent DDoS Attacks:
To protect against DDoS attacks, it is recommended to host the website on Cloudflare and enable the “Under Attack” mode whenever a DDoS attack is detected.
Types of DDoS Attacks:
- Volume-based attacks: These attacks aim to overwhelm the target website’s network bandwidth with a flood of traffic. Examples include UDP floods, ICMP floods, and amplification attacks.
- Protocol-based attacks: These attacks exploit vulnerabilities in network protocols to consume server resources or bring down the website. Examples include SYN floods, Ping of Death, and Smurf attacks.
- Application-layer attacks: These attacks target the web application layer, exhausting server resources such as CPU, memory, or database connections. Examples include HTTP floods and Slowloris attacks.
Botnets:
Hackers often use a network of compromised computers (known as a botnet) to launch DDoS attacks. These computers are usually infected with malware and controlled remotely by the attacker. The attacker commands the botnet to send a massive amount of traffic to the target website, making it difficult to identify the source of the attack.
Impact of DDoS Attacks:
- Service disruption: DDoS attacks can render a website inaccessible or significantly slow down its performance, causing inconvenience to legitimate users.
- Financial losses: Downtime and loss of business during a DDoS attack can result in significant financial losses for organizations.
- Reputational damage: Extended periods of service unavailability or poor performance can damage a company’s reputation and customer trust.
DDoS Mitigation Techniques:
- Traffic filtering: Employing traffic filtering mechanisms to identify and block malicious traffic, often using firewalls or intrusion prevention systems (IPS).
- Rate limiting: Implementing measures to limit the rate of incoming traffic to protect against sudden traffic spikes.
Load balancing: Distributing incoming traffic across multiple servers to prevent overload on a single server. - Content Delivery Networks (CDNs): Using CDNs, such as Cloudflare, to distribute traffic across geographically dispersed servers and provide DDoS protection services.
- Anomaly detection: Deploying monitoring systems that can detect abnormal traffic patterns and trigger mitigation responses.
It’s important for organizations to have robust DDoS protection measures in place to minimize the impact of such attacks and ensure the availability and security of their online services.
