How to Keep Your Infrastructure Safe from DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks seem to be on the rise and many instances of these attacks have affected popular sites like Twitter, Netflix and Reddit. Cyber threats should never be overlooked and one needs to learn from their mistakes to ensure that these do not happen again. The DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attacks are those which will strike servers over and over again through a big group of many interconnected servers.

Very often, these attacks are deliberate and people try to use them to buy hot-selling products like concert tickets. But these are usually caused by participants who have had their devices infected with malware. Here, a malicious group specifically targets businesses with a view to sabotaging them. In such a botnet attack, this network of infected devices will start sending requests to targeted servers. The number of requests keeps growing to such an extent that the device fails to respond after a time.

Malicious actors will keep hunting for newer targets and to keep your business protected from these, it is imperative for you to take up these measures:

Monitoring Traffic Patterns: To start with, you need to monitor your site traffic to look for unusual patterns. As a business owner you must be familiar with the kind of web traffic you get on your site. Increase in traffic may be due to new advertisements or promotions or events. So, when you notice unusual increase in traffic for some other reason, you will become suspicious about it. Any DDoS attack will typically be preceded by small-scale attacks before a full-blown intrusion takes place. The attackers are known to prefix a time when they will carry out their attack; especially choosing heavy traffic days like Christmas and Thanksgiving. During such periods, it is very easy for the attackers to mix with the regular traffic and then crash the server.

Offering More Resources to Network: When you can give more than enough resources to your network you can prepare your site to handle DDoS attacks. So, if you can arrange for high bandwidth you will able to help it withstand sudden traffic spikes that may be brought about by such attacks. You will gain precious time to tackle the crisis better. So, ideally your network should be able to handle nearly six times the standard traffic demands. Apart from arranging for more resources for your network, you need to ensure that upstream providers have necessary resources for handling DDoS attacks.

Uninterrupted Vigilance: It is very important to remain alert and vigilant to spot such attacks. Security incidents may be very rare occurrences but very often this leads to complacency amongst security staff members. There is a consequent lapse in security and the site becomes highly susceptible to cyber attacks. Your job is to assess your strongest network points for loopholes. When you fail to do this, you may not be prepared to withstand the onslaught of a DDoS attack. Your provider should be able to offer failure analysis, multiple network diagnostic solutions and consulting services which can help your business to do away with any such complacency and maintain preparedness at all times.

Choosing Dedicated or Hybrid Servers: To protect one’s business from DDoS attacks a good idea is to sign up for dedicated servers or hybrid servers. These hosting solutions will guarantee that your business enjoys a server’s resources exclusively. In shared hosting or VPS hosting, security options are far restricted and these are typically deployed by the host alone. So, recovery from such cyber attacks in shared servers takes a while.

Installing Regular Updates: It is also imperative to install regular updates to ensure that the security of your site is not threatened by DDoS or any such attacks. The DDoS are usually targeted at exploiting those aspects of security arrangements which have recently been found to be inadequate. When you can install security updates for open source applications right after they get released, you can protect your site better against any cyber attack. Updates are usually overlooked but should not be because when you install a recent update, you can be certain that any security holes left behind in the earlier versions would have been rectified in this version. You should ensure that all updates get installed automatically so that you always have the best protection for your site.

These are some key considerations which can make your work easier when it comes to handling cyber threats like DDoS attacks. These will always be prime causes for concern for all businesses but implementation of these suggested measures can control the damages to a large extent. These offer multiple protective layers for your website and give you peace of mind. So, your hosting provider must include all the latest robust security offerings and solid support in case a DDoS attack occurs.

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