Distributed denial of service(DDoS) attacks rose to unprecedented levels in the second half of 2021, according to Microsoft Azure’s report on third and fourth quarter DDoS attacks. According to Azure’s protection team, this is said to be the most significant attack in history. In November, the group found a DDoS attack with a throughput of 3.47Tbps and a packet rate of 340 million packets per second(PPS) targeting an Azure customer in Asia.
These attacks have shown no sign of reduction; they seem to be getting rampant nowadays. Moreover, they aim for different prey, and your business could be at risk.
COMMON DDoS TARGETS
The gaming community experienced the most DDoS attacks between July and December 2021. VOIP and broadband service came next. Read more on how to protect your business from this attack below; here are some commonly targeted industries;
- Gaming Industries
- Gambling Industries
- Financial Institutes
- Software and Technology Companies
- Businesses
- Media and Entertainment
- Internet and telecom Organizations
Since SMEs tend to have smaller IT budgets, they have fewer or no dedicated staff keeping an eye on cybersecurity; these DDoS attackers tend to be interested in small business websites.
REASONS WHY EVERY BUSINESS IS A TARGET
- A HAPHAZARD APPROACH TO DDoS MITIGATION AND SECURITY
With the increasing quest for technological knowledge globally, most business owners still use out-of-date methods like legacy firewalls and signature-based traffic monitoring to protect against DDoS.
These attacks evolve each day and get more intricate, and these old measures would do more damage than good. In addition, smaller businesses are at a higher risk of cyber attacks than larger ones as they often lack the budget and expertise to implement effective cyber security measures.
- BUSINESS COMPETITION
A competitor can have your web pages vandalized and erode your search engine rankings in competitive industries, resulting in a substantial reputation defect.
- TRAINING GROUND FOR OTHER ATTACKS
DDoS attacks are sometimes launched as a diversionary move to divert security teams. But, at the same time, the cybercriminals carry out another type of attack, possibly to gain entry to and steal important information.
BENEFITS OF DDoS PROTECTION
- DEFEND AGAINST NEW AND EVOLVING THREATS
By implementing DDoS-specific security controls, organizations may limit their attack surface while simultaneously lowering the risk of business-impacting outage and interruption. This form of defense can block an attack while still allowing legitimate users to access your website as usual. The DDoS defense prevents harmful traffic from reaching its intended target, minimizing the attack’s impact while allowing legitimate traffic to get through unaffected.
- AVOID SEARCH ENGINES RANKINGS DEGRADATION
DDoS assaults force websites to crash, go offline, and become inaccessible to legitimate users. As a result, crashing or downtime-prone websites lose search engine ranks. Furthermore, if the website owners do not have backups or do not know how to stop the attack, the search engine’s internal link listing would be lost.
As a result, competitors frequently use Distributed Denial of Service to redirect visitors to their website and lower your search engine ranks. Businesses may avoid all of this with effective DDoS defense.
- YOUR SITE IS ALWAYS ACCESSIBLE
DDoS overwhelms a website with excessive requests, depletes its resources, and renders it unavailable to legitimate traffic. Any business engagement through the website would be elusive until the administrator stopped the attack. It tarnishes the brand’s image and damages the company’s reputation.
Businesses may ensure that their website and digital assets are always available with adequate Distributed Denial of Service protection. Globally dispersed content delivery networks (CDNs) are one example of DDoS services that help improve website speed and performance without compromising security.
- MINIMIZE COST ASSOCIATED WITH WEB SECURITY
If DDoS hit a network, businesses would lose data, assets, and other resources. The financial or monetary value is enormous when repairing, rebuilding, or purchasing new equipment and fixing the attacked network. In addition, hardware components, such as routers and PCs, are expensive to buy and install.
WHAT’S NEXT: HOW CAN YOU PROTECT YOUR BUSINESS?
Businesses should implement Multi-level DDoS prevention techniques across their network, apps, and infrastructure. For example, firewalls, VPNs, anti-spam, content filtering, and other security layers could be used to monitor activities and identify traffic abnormalities that could indicate a DDoS attack.
Taking a proactive approach to security and enrolling an intelligent, controlled, and advanced Distributed Denial of Service protection solution such as AppTrana is the best way to secure yourself from DDoS attacks. Indusface AppTrana can assist you in avoiding being a DDoS target while also improving the performance and speed of your website.