From fledgling firms just starting out, to large-scale corporations, all business can face the worst-case scenario when they’re hit by hackers.
The reasons behind attacks on a firm’s digital resources can be varied, from plundering valuable information to intentionally harming a company’s finances or reputation. In recent years, thousands of enterprises and organisations have moved away from an on-premises infrastructure, favouring the cloud instead. While the advantaged of digital transformation are numerous, a business operating entirely online must have robust cybersecurity in place.
DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack are among of the most common cyber threats faced by firms online. These single-minded attacks have one aim – to deny shutdown operations, knocking them offline.
What’s the damage following a DDoS attack?
DDoS attacks are designed to disrupt how web services, websites and servers operate by hitting them with a barrage of requests that appear legitimate. Any digital resources that have not been engineered to cope with a high volume of traffic will simply stop working, which means sites and services become unavailable to real users.
If you run an e-commerce platform and you’re attacked in this way, your customers will likely select your competitor to buy from instead. Meanwhile, if you run a subscription service and your clients can’t use their membership, you may receive a raft of complaints and cancellations.
Three categories of DDoS attacks
While assaults often combine a mix of different tactics, the three clearly defined kinds of DDoS attack are:
1. Protocol attacks
This attack type exploits vulnerabilities of network protocols like ICMP, UDP and TCP. The aim of this attack vector is to overload the network’s capacity, employing pinpoint actions designed to exploit defects in a network rather than swamping it with a massive volume of requests.
2. Flood attacks
Sometimes called volumetric attacks, these high-volume assaults are perhaps the most typical type of DDoS attack encountered by enterprises today. Threat actors send a vast number of individual requests simultaneously to the target server, resulting in the network’s bandwidth capabilities being entirely blocked. Volumes seen in such attacks can be many terabits per second, with infrastructures incapacitated and unable to process legitimate requests.
3. Application attacks
These application layer attacks target web apps and servers, like a site’s content management system (CMS). The aim of the assault is to render the resource unable to provide services, typically achieved by overloading either the RAM or CPU using an HTTP request. This results in the system starting to process a high volume of internal requests – one it simply hasn’t been designed to cope with.
Comprehensive cybersecurity
At Galaxkey, we have designed a secure platform that has zero backdoors and never stores passwords that can lead to vulnerabilities. Our system also features end-to-end encryption, ensuring that whether confidential data is at rest or being transmitted, it always remains free from unauthorised access. If you’re looking to step up your cybersecurity today with a user-friendly system that’s easy to integrate with the way you work, test-drive our innovative solution for yourself with a free 14-day trial today.
