DDoS Attack

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious cyberattack that attempts to disrupt businesses by overwhelming their servers, services or network infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic. DDoS attacks achieve its malicious intent by utilizing multiple compromised computer systems or bots distributed worldwide as sources of attack traffic. Furthermore, it occurs when a threat actors use resources from multiple, remote locations to launch attacks on an organization’s online operations from botnets or network of compromise computer systems scattered across wide geographic areas.

Cybercriminals exploit computer systems anywhere in the world through the Internet, make them slaves, and join their herd of computers to launch DDoS attacks when needed. DDoS attacks deplete resources of computer systems and make it nonresponsive. SYN flooding, ICMP (Ping) flooding and “Ping of Death” are common example of DDoS cyberattakcs.

The motivations behind DDoS cybercrimes may include one or more of the following reasons:

• Cyber warfare
• Extortion
• Ideological differences
• Boredom
• Nation-state

Best DDoS prevention mechanisms may include one or more of the following security controls:

• Closely monitor network traffic for potential anomalies
• Make networks resilient through redundancy, fault tolerance and high availability (HA) solutions
• Establish basic cybersecurity hygiene
• Scale up bandwidth/ports
• Deploy anti-DDoS solutions
• Move to the massive cloud
• More