What is a DDoS?
Stands for Distributed Denial-Of-Service Attack – DDoS is a type of attack that sends an overwhelming flood of requests to disrupt the normal traffic that a website or a server receives to cause havoc and make it vulnerable.
DDoS is a total nightmare for online businesses as it prevents legitimate users from accessing the site and rendering it useless.
How to Identify a DDoS Attack?
Some signs might just be because of some technical problems from your own server but there are particular and clear symptoms you can look through to identify a potential DDoS attack.
- Server responding with 503 error due to service outage
- Unusual traffic patterns that occurs at certain hours of the day
- Inability to access any website
The best sign to identify a DDoS attack would be via a network traffic monitoring and analysis which is possible with the use of firewall or intrusion detection systems.
How to Prevent DDoS Attacks?
There’s really no specific type to prevent a DDoS attack but there are several practices you can implement that can lessen the potential of being a target.
- Scale up your bandwidth – Talk about expanding the pathway, add more bandwidth if you notice an unusual amount of traffic.
- Learn the symptoms of a DDoS attack – Run some manual tests, DDoS attacks are pretty easy to identify especially when your website receives a stable traffic.
- Outsourcing DDoS protection – There are companies that specialize in scaling resources to respond to an identified DDoS attack, look for one and take advantage.
- Consistent monitoring of unusual activity – Monitoring traffic in real-time is the best practice you can do to identify a DDoS attack, it will help you prevent it from completely happening.
- Practicing good cyber hygiene – Prevention is better than cure, practice all the best security prevention such as changing passwords, using multiple authentication and so on.
