subject: Getting Acquainted With Ddos Attacks [print this page] In this day and age, people have started to rely more deeply on the Internet. The internet is an accepted means of advertisement; every business has a virtual presence on the Internet in the form of a website or a blog. Some offer online services while entire online businesses rely heavily on the Internet to generate any sort of revenue for themselves.
However, hackers are known to notoriously abuse the freedom and access to information that the Internet offers. Hackers are also continuously creating new and harmful attack tools and looking for ways to engage in stealthy website attacks that the system cannot detect until its too late. Following this trend, the DDoS attack method is becoming the most common.
A DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Services) is an advanced version the of DoS attack (Denial of Service). While the DoS attack is a single, direct attack, a DDoS attack happens when someone with multiple fake identities, uses those identities to simultaneously attack the website by making a machine or a network resource unavailable to its intended users. During a DDoS attack, infected computers controlled by a hacker can flood the targeted victims information infrastructure with data, preventing its network or application servers from functioning efficiently.
Recently, website attacks causing failure in functions have taken a sharp increase in number because of DDoS attacks. The list of website attacks victims are constantly increasing. The companies to suffer because of a DDoSattack include MasterCard, Visa, Twitter, Wordpress etc. Most website attacks are hard to prevent because in a DDoS attack, the external traffic overflow going to the victim originates from multiple sources hundreds of thousands or more.
This fact makes most measures to stop the DDoSattack impracticable because it is very difficult to distinguish legitimate user data flow from the data generated by the attack. The good news about a DDoSattack is that it does not steal or expose confidential data since DDoS attacks do not infiltrate the database, they simply overwhelm it with traffic. However, it can be used as a distraction while a targeted breach takes place.
There are few defense measures that can help to stop a website attack. Other than just waiting it out, a preventative measure that you can deploy is to acquire the services of a company providing security measures against DDoS attacks. Doing so will ensure that the service provider can use DDoS alleviation measures to deflect the effects of a DDoSattack.
If you wish look up more protection measures, please visit http://nexusguard.com which deals specifically with DDoSattacks.