Most of us who spend a significant time on the internet realize that we have to have some level of antivirus protection in order to protect our personal files and details. Of course, there are those who totally disregard that notion, hiding behind the defense of, “it’ll never happen to me.” Next thing you know, one of those folks has clicked on a link from an African Prince offering them 10 million dollars, and all is lost. While being hit with a virus at home can be catastrophic, for the most part it simply means having to do a clean install, whilst making sure that all of our family photos are still safe tucked away on a separate disk or flash drive.
The next time you complain about having to disinfect your laptop with a virus removal program, spare a thought out for the online business entity whose entire website can be taken down by a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), with the goal being to shut down that business for the foreseeable future. While most attacks are aimed at financial institutions and big name corporations, it’s not entirely uncommon for a disgruntled computer geek to want to shut down a gaming or entertainment site, just to show that they can.
The only thing more frightening than a DDoS is the number of ways in which it can be achieved. Those range from sending huge packets of information to the server so that it overloads and is unable to handle requests from legitimate visitors, to infecting the network with malware, effectively poisoning everything it touches. That’s just really scraping the surface of the methods that attackers use to get in, without even mentioning the more creepy sounding methods, such as SYN Flood and R-U-Dead Yet? A simple antivirus simply isn’t enough to keep attackers at bay, and to try and use the same software we use at home would be the equivalent of putting a 2 foot high fence around Fort Knox.
This may be why many big corporations, and even some small businesses, are protecting the domains by employing the use of a professional DDoS protection company who can recognize potential attacks before they have a chance to take hold. A large part of that protection revolves around creating what’s known as attack bandwidth, which is basically enough storage space to handle the massive amounts of information that are sent during a DDoS attack. This gives the pros ample time to stop it, usually in a matter of minutes, before it’s allowed to bring your website down.>
It’s estimated that billions of dollars per year are lost due to DDos attacks, and while you may think your company is safe from such nonsense, do you really want to end up like the poor fellow who clicks that infected link without any form of PC protection?
