09.03.2023

What is a DDOS attack and how to protect yourself?

The AlexHost.com team always takes care of both its advanced user and the novice user. But absolutely EVERYONE needs to KNOW the danger from a DDoS attack in order to protect themselves and the health of the company’s infrastructure and client services.

DDoS attacks have recently become a serious problem and a headache for Internet resource owners around the world. That is why protection against DDoS attacks on a site today is not just an additional option or feature, but a mandatory security necessity for those who want to avoid losses and damaged reputation.

A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is a type of cyber attack in which multiple computers are used to flood the target system with an excessive amount of traffic, preventing users from using them.

What are the reasons for the attacks?

There are many reasons why a DDoS attack can be carried out, we decided to describe the most common of them:

One of the reasons could be political hostility: a DDoS attack can be used as a tool to protest against a certain organization or a certain government, such cases have become more frequent especially during the election campaigns.
A common reason is personal animosity or revenge: a person can carry out a DDoS attack on a company or organization as revenge.
Organized Crime: DDoS attacks can be used as a distraction while attackers are performing other illegal activities such as stealing sensitive data.
Rivalry or Competition: In these cases, a DDoS attack is used to harm a competitor.
Financial benefit: DDoS attacks can be used as a means to extort money.
Entertainment: Attackers can launch DDoS attacks just to disrupt their online presence for fun.

There are a huge number of reasons, but all of them are aimed at disrupting the performance of the company’s infrastructure and customer service. It is important to understand that all types of attacks are punishable by law.

What types of DDOS attacks exist and which vital organs harm the health of your system?

There are many types of attacks, here are some of them:

Bulk attacks: These attacks involve overloading the system with a large amount of traffic, such as: HTTP flood, UDP flood and ICMP flood.
Protocol attacks: These attacks exploit vulnerabilities, flaws in network layer protocols to interrupt service, such as SYN flood, fragmented packet attacks, and Ping of Death.
Application attacks. These attacks target specific applications and services such as Slowloris and HTTP requests.
Hybrid Attacks: Combining different attack elements to create a more powerful and effective attack.
Amplification attacks: These attacks use a network of compromised devices to increase the amount of traffic sent to the target, such as DNS amplification and NTP amplification.

Is there protection against DDoS attacks and what methods are best to use?

There are many ways to protect against DDoS attacks, we will describe the most common of them:

CDN (Content Delivery Networks): Provides a layer of protection by absorbing and filtering out malicious traffic before it reaches the target server.
Traffic Filtering: This is the process of blocking or restricting certain types of traffic based on certain criteria such as the source IP address and the type of traffic.
Firewalls: Can be used to block or restrict incoming traffic from suspicious sources, and can also be configured to provide protection against DDoS attacks.
Load balancing: distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers to prevent any server from being overloaded.
Network rate limiting: This is the process of limiting the amount of incoming traffic to a target to a certain rate or threshold.
DDoS protection services: Use a combination of methods such as traffic filtering, traffic redirection, and traffic normalization to protect against DDoS attacks.
Cloud protection services: such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Shield, use multiple layers of protection and traffic control to protect against DDoS attacks.

It is important to remember that no solution is foolproof and that a combination of these methods is often the best approach to DDoS protection.

Some tips from the AlexHost.com team to protect your site!

The specialists and engineers of the AlexHost.com team offer several steps you can take to protect your site from DDoS attacks:

Use a CDN content delivery network.
Protect your network: implement firewalls, traffic filtering and network speed limiting to block and restrict suspicious traffic from accessing your web resource.
Implement load balancing: distribute incoming traffic across multiple servers, the more the better, to prevent any single server from being overloaded.
Update your software regularly: apply patches and software updates to minimize potential vulnerabilities and bugs.
Monitor your network: We recommend using monitoring tools to track traffic patterns and detect potential DDoS attacks.
Always be prepared for a plan B: prepare a plan of action in advance so that you know what steps to take in the event of a DDoS attack.
Consider using a DDoS protection service.
It is also important to back up your data regularly and have a disaster recovery plan in case an attack causes significant damage to your web resource.

Will see the conclusion.

In this article, we got acquainted with the term and phenomenon of a DDoS attack and strongly recommended some options for protecting your web resource, site, or any other data from fraudulent attacks.

It is important to remember that such malicious actions can disable even the most secure and large web resources. This will entail serious consequences in the form of huge losses and loss of customers. That is why securing your resource from DDoS attacks is an urgent and very important task for all commercial and government structures.

It is important that our hosting company AlexHost.com today uses a complex hybrid filtering algorithm from Voxility, thanks to which we are confident in our security and guarantee the protection of our client’s security.

Any service provided by our company automatically includes the DDoS protection service. You can get acquainted with the list of services provided by our company by clicking on the links https://alexhost.com.