Distributed Denial of Service, referred to as DDoS, attacks are a fact of life in the modern business landscape. Any company with an online presence is, unfortunately, vulnerable to DDoS attacks — not even the smallest organizations are immune.
While the cost of dealing with DDoS attacks is high, the negative impacts of a DDoS attack go well beyond financial losses. Taking steps toward DDoS attack prevention help to eliminate a significant impact and is one of the best strategies you can take ahead of dealing with the fallout should one occur.
What is a DDoS Attack?
A DDoS attack is a type of cyberattack designed to prevent legitimate access to a website or application. As its name implies, cybercriminals performing a DDoS attack use multiple devices distributed over the internet to mount the attack. DDoS attacks get carried out for various reasons, including financial gain, deflection, industrial espionage, ideological or political reasons, and also state-sponsored attacks.
With a DDoS attack, cybercriminals aim to overwhelm the attacked service with so many requests and network traffic volumes that the servers hosting the targeted website or application cannot respond — to the point that they become inoperable. DDoS attacks can take a website or application offline for hours or even days.
How does a DDoS attack work?
DDoS attack is a catch-all term that covers multiple attack methods — attack methods that can occur at various layers of the network stack. Modern DDoS attacks will often use a combination of techniques within the application, network, and transport layers.
Our blog published in September covers the nitty-gritty of how a DDoS attack works, along with the history of DDoS attacks, DDoS attack mitigation and remediation techniques. You can read that blog here. Some of the highlights of that blog, pulled from surveys and reports, are quite striking and bear repeating:
Mounting DDoS attacks have become commoditized with DDoS kits available, allowing individuals without technical skills the ability to target organizations with attacks. Case in point: the threat is rising with more DDoS attacks occurring every day.
DDoS Attacks in the News
General statistics and trends about DDoS attacks are important and required to demonstrate the need for DDoS protection and mitigation measures. But taking it a step further, calling out attention to newsworthy DDoS attacks and their impacts helps to drive the point home. Here are a few significant DDoS attacks that have made headlines in recent years:
What could you lose from a DDoS attack?
DDoS attacks cause disruption and downtime for online services, and the downtime occurred will have multiple financial implications. Firstly, when the system is disrupted, users cannot complete their jobs and productivity stalls out. If the attacked site or application provides client services, there could be both financial and reputation damage due to downtime.
If the service is a sales channel, the implication is even worse because sales transactions cannot be completed. Research shows that 50% of customers will abandon a shopping cart if it takes six seconds or more to load — and the reputational damage could be even greater.
Increasingly, DDoS attacks are being used as a cover to hide other attack methods that aim to deploy malware. In many cases this is ransomware, which carries significant financial impact on the attacked organization, as well. Ransom demands also occur when DDoS attacks are in-progress.
The cost of downtime associated with a DDoS attack will be unique to each organization. But most published estimates from industry surveys put the losses associated with downtime for a small- to mid-sized business in the range of $20,000-40,000 per hour.
Aside from the financial damage associated with a DDoS attack, the reputational damage when systems are down — and the damage of when the public learns of the attack (which they will) — can be damming. In all, the best thing to mitigate the risk of financial loss from a DDoS attack is to deploy DDoS attack prevention solutions.
What can you do to prevent a DDoS attack in 2022?
Primary defense against DDoS attacks could come from network providers or dedicated DDoS protection services. Cloud platforms like AWS and Microsoft Azure also provide DDoS protection. But strategically placed load balancers can be used as part of a broader solution to lessen the impacts of DDoS attacks.
IT teams can use a load balancer to eliminate single points of failure and reroute traffic if a service should fall victim to a DDoS attack. This includes regional routing of traffic using global server load balancing, or GSLB. Load balancers also add resiliency by rerouting live traffic from one server to another if a server should fall to a DDoS attack or otherwise become unavailable. Not only that, but load balancers also reduce the attack surface visible to attackers, making it more difficult to overwhelm applications and saturate network links.
3 ways LoadMaster load balancers help mitigate DDoS attacks
LoadMaster is an essential part of DDoS protection
LoadMaster is the premier choice for businesses requiring load balancing. Your business success and reputation rest heavily on your ability to deliver fast, highly available and secure information — and LoadMaster helps you achieve high-performance application delivery.
Learn more about how LoadMaster can help you achieve greater layered application security and mitigate DDoS attacks.
Talk with a Progress technical expert about protecting your organization from a DDoS attack and get guided steps to protection your organization and its reputation from a DDoS attack.