Page 96 - Cyber Warnings August 2017

Five Things You Can Do To Protect Your Server From DDoS

Attacks

Botnets are growing at an alarming rate - as are distributed denial of service
attacks. How can you protect yourself?
A hacktivist with a grudge. A black hat looking to mask a more insidious, sophisticated attack. A
criminal who wants to hold your business for ransom. A kid who just wants to wreak havoc.

Any of these individuals might target your business - and even without the necessary technical
expertise to break into your systems, they’ve still the potential to cripple you. Thanks to the
advent of the Internet of Things - yes, that Internet of Things - one of the oldest cyberattacks in
history is currently enjoying a sort of renaissance.

I’m speaking, of course, about distributed denial of service attacks. Deceptively simple in nature,
a DDoS attack uses an army of infected systems (known as a botnet) to flood a server, network,
or service with bogus traffic. Eventually, the target is overwhelmed, and legitimate visitors are no
longer able to access it.

CNET’s Laura Hautala uses the analogy of a dam - and she’s not far off from the truth.

“Websites have to filter out good traffic from bad, kind of like a dam that lets only so much water
through,” she writes. “But if someone upstream can send an unexpected torrent down, the dam
will overflow and maybe even crack, letting all the water through. That floods the area below --

and in our analogy, it drowns the website you're trying to reach. Now no one can go there.”

Not only are DDoS attacks growing cleverer and more sophisticated, modern botnets absolutely
dwarf the botnets of yesterday in size. I’m talking potentially hundreds of thousands of devices
flooding targets with terabytes of bogus data. If that doesn’t intimidate you, it should.

The notion that entire sections of the Internet might be brought down by a script kiddie no longer
seems absurd. To an extent, it’s already happened. And it’s going to happen again.

And again. And again. And again, until we can zero in on some ironclad way of defending

ourselves from them.

The silver lining here is that it’s unlikely your business will be targeted by a behemoth botnet for
any extended period of time. Mind you, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take measures to
protect yourself. You definitely need to.

The easiest way, of course, is to simply ensure your network capacity is large enough that it’s

96 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – August 2017 Edition
Copyright © Cyber Defense Magazine, All rights reserved worldwide.