DDoS i.e. Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks are attempts by hackers to make any online service down by sending a flood of traffic that the host cannot handle at the time.
The Tagets of DDoS Attack
In the past, big companies and large websites were only its targets but nowadays even small business websites come with the issue of DDoS attacks occurring on their websites.
What DDoS attack does to your web service?
The only good thing is no data loss occurs during a DDoS attack, all it does is makes the service unavailable to users. It is not done by an individual hacker sitting on a system instead the attacker directs hundreds to thousands of zombie host systems against its target. These hosts are drafted from a million unprotected devices through high-bandwidth connections. The attacker builds a legion of such zombie hosts and then they wait for the command to attack any service.
The result of the DDoS attack
The result of such an attack is the denial of the service, loss of revenue as well as reputation because the end user may find the service less reliable as it goes frequently down.
How to find out you have been attacked with DDoS?
The first sign is the service becomes unavailable to users but that can also happen due to your success with legitimate traffic especially when you choose to host your website on a shared hosting plan and not on a Cloud or Dedicated Server.
Other signs include slow or denied access to your web service for days rather than a spike of seconds or minutes. You may check whether any single IP address is generating a large number of requests. Check your server’s log file to see if any flood of traffic is being generated from suspicious sources or the TTL i.e. time to live on a ping request times out frequently.
How to protect yourself from DDoS attacks?
The advanced, as well as the premium plan of Website Security at Sangkrit.net, offers you DDoS protection which you can easily set up on your own after subscribing to it.
It also offers you CDN i.e. Content Delivery Network that disburdens the load on a single server to many remote servers so that when traffic comes to your website it can be routed to the geographically closest CDN server.
Real success is no different than a DDoS attack
Choose a Dedicated Server to host your website because real success is no different than a DDoS attack.
To find out whether the increase in traffic is actually a DDoS or not you would need to know how to distinguish between good and bad traffic. Otherwise, you might lose traffic from legitimate visitors. A few key points we have discussed above such as single IP generating too many requests can be a DDoS attack, etc.
You may also take help by appointing a system administrator to look after your website or you may subscribe to online support (available at per hour per terminal cost) simply by sending an email to the system at Sangkrit.net.