There has been a rapid advancement in technology which resulted in the digital transformation of businesses. However, in return, there are increased threats of risks in the form of cyber-attacks. These attacks happen when criminals try to gain illegal access to secure data available on a certain network. The intent of these individuals is to damage the reputation of the organization or a demand huge amount. Cybercriminals often target individuals and organizations.
They use a variety of tricks to get into your system and access all details. Here we are going to explain about DDOS (Distributed denial of service) attack and how it can affect your business. Before going into the further details, we will learn about DDOS attack.
What is a DDOS Attack?
A DDOS attack is an activity in which a hacker disrupts the normal online traffic flow of your website. In this attack hacker overflows your site with immense traffic. DDOS attack become more effective by using numerous computer systems as a medium of attack traffic. Moreover, this attack is fully capable of offlining your entire system for weeks.
Below is an example of such attacks to help you understand things easily
DDOS Attack Example
BBC servers faced a huge DDOS Attack on December 2015 that displayed all their websites as unavailable. The attack spread to all the content services associated with BBC servers that failed to load and the entire world had no connection to the world’s biggest news provider. Although there are various examples of such attacks, however, it is productive to think about the real impact of DDOS attacks on your organization.
Think of a business having information about its clients and serving as a communication medium between the organization and consumers. The company is using an application to manage communication and other affairs such as generating contracts, selling its products and services, etc.
If such an organization faces a DDOS attack below will be the consequences in this regard.
- No employee will have the control over application to perform its daily tasks
- The unavailability of applications will lead to delays in services resulting in a failure to meet the service levels.
- Google’s service availability issue in Central Europe during November 2016 is also an example when Google faced several issues in this regard, for instance, all taxi services relying on Google Maps didn’t work.
- Because of the unavailability of the website the users will rush to the phone number and email which will slow down the whole process of the organization.
- In case the services are related to public media the general public will start finding the information from other sources.
Consequences Of DDOS Attack On Your Organization
Your website will0 go down
A DDOS attack is fully capable of shutting the whole system down within the seconds. The users will no longer have access to any information on the site. In case you are running an e-commerce store that earns its profit through the website a little downtime might cause you a huge monetary loss.
In 2015 an internet performance management company was hit with a DDOS attack that shut down some e-commerce giants including Amazon, Shopify, and Etsy, etc. It was estimated that during the attack Shopify suffered a loss of more than $10,000 an hour and Amazon faced $50 million per day.
Your productivity Declines
If the attack could not damage your entire system because of solid security measures it will make your processors run slower than usual. The huge volume of such abnormal traffic blocks your system’s channel by increasing the time it requires to respond to the received requests from customers.
Your reputation Goes Down
After the DDOS attack on BBC channel the site experienced a massive flow of dissatisfied customers. You can imagine how damaging a DDOS Attack can be to the reputation of your online business. These days competition is tough for businesses as customers choose a company/website which is responsive. On the other hand, a website exposed to cyber attacks will suffer from a damaged reputation in the market. In addition, it will make the customer to think again and again before landing on your web pages regarding any product or services.
Your SEO ranking Might suffer
In case your website speed is slow or inactive this will only result in a low ranking on the search engine pages. Google will not consider any excuses for that such as a DDOS attack or any other service outages. If you didn’t solve the problem right away your site will be buried on the 100th page of google. The search engine will calculate the overall site speed and rank you accordingly.
Data loss
DDOS Attack sets up a way for hackers to breach the secret information of the company. Moreover, it takes down the firewall and distracts the IT officials from the data theft activity. The same happened to SONY company when hackers distracted the company officials and stole the data of million of users at the same time.
Above are the problems you might face because of a DDOS attack on your website. You might wonder what should I do to prevent my business from such attacks. There is no need to worry as we are here to hel you regarding how to make your website remain safe from these attacks.
You May Also Like to Read: How to Remove Malware from Your WordPress Site
How to Fight a DDOS Attack
It takes an expert to recognize the main source of the problem as a DDOS attack looks like an overflow of traffic or a bottleneck in the data network of your company. The first step in fighting the DDOS attack is to find out what exactly is happening at the movement. Here you have to do detailed logging it will help you to figure out the actual source of the problem and the effect of the attack.
The company can do this by taking help from multiple tools for managing the logs such as Event Management, IDS/IPS technology, and firewalls.
In this step, you have to plan a strategy to eliminate the DDOS Attack through the utilization of the available resources. For that, you should have complete details about the capabilities and limitations of your hardware. Because DDOS attack counter strategies often fail badly as the owners are not aware of how to configure back their key appliance.
Moreover, you should have an emergency response plan in case your network is under a cyber-attack. The plan includes what you need to do and the individuals to whom you should inform quickly.
In the final step, you have to improve your security to prevent future attacks. Moreover, you should make changes to the current infrastructure to ensure that your information is safe from any unforeseen attack. You can do it by hiring a professional team who is skilled enough to deal with such kinds of problems. In case you are trying to do things on your own you might end up suffering huge data and monetary loss.
There are numerous companies who offer technology focused applications and a bunch of tools to tackle the cyber-attacks with ease. In addition, they help you by providing an insight of what is happening at the movement. These organizations have dedicated professionals who are not only quick in helping you in the problem but offer repaid responses when required.
Another great approach to finding out about the attack is familiarizing yourself with the internet traffic over your website. As a DDOS attack brings an overflow of traffic over your site so it becomes easy for you to analyze that your site is under attack.
Once you will get to know how much traffic your site it will be easy for you to know your business is facing a DDOS attack. The early knowledge will help you to prepare the response plan and save your company from a huge loss.
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