Research: DDoS Attacks

What is DDoS Attack?

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is a way of damage a network or a website. DDoS attacks are a major cyber threat to all organizations operating over the internet. The aim is to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with numerous traffic from multiple sources.

The traffic can be created with requests and information like messages. Since a web source can handle a certain amount of traffic at a given time, it is inevitable for this source to disrupt the attack.

As a consequence of a successful DDoS attack, the web resource may become completely unavailable or slow enough to make the user uncomfortable. Considering that, in a modern world, websites are the face of an organization, these attacks can cause more harm than thought.

What is the Goal of DDoS Attacks?

The main goal of DDoS attacks is to damage the company in terms of financial and reputational.

Financial Damage

Some companies provide all their services over the internet. That is to say that all of these companies' money source is the internet. When such companies are blocked from internet access, they have to face high amounts of financial losses.

During and after DDoS Attacks, problems may occur in systems. As a result of these problems, deletion or corruption of data can cause temporary or permanent damage. Many systems may need to be reinstalled and/or recovered to ensure business continuity. However, it can take a long time to recover system data, and also this process is very costly.

Reputational Damage

Due to service disruptions caused by DDoS attacks, organizations suffer a great loss of reputation against users and their stakeholders. In this case, it causes a decrease in the reliability of the organization. If the target is a government institution, this can lead to many financial and political problems.

How Do You Prevent DDoS Attacks?

DDoS prevention is most commonly provided through two models. The first is to purchase the DDoS protection product and position it in front of the organization's systems. The second is to purchase a DDoS prevention service, which offers services in different ways from an internet service provider.

 The risk of financial and reputational losses are the main reasons for the need for security products and services. Likewise, these should be considered in the selection of DDoS protection products and services. The tests carried out with these products and services enable the boundaries of the systems to be recognized and improved.

Why Perform DDoS Tests?

DDoS tests should be performed in order not to suffer financial and reputational damage due to leakage of any information or asset of the organization. Generally, DDoS tests are performed to measure the efficiency and limits of the DDoS prevention products and services to improve the organization's capabilities.

DDoS prevention systems and products are not plug-and-play systems. An organization’s normal and abnormal network traffics, baselines, and thresholds can be defined with DDoS tests. Besides testing the devices and server in the organization's network, it is also important for security professionals who manage DDoS prevention systems to experience the response of the system before a real DDoS attack occurs.