DoS and DDoS attacks are now a common threat to businesses on the Internet. With more than 2,000 distinct attacks every week, DDoS attacks have become one the most costly form of cyber attack any website or business may face today.
DOS and DDoS attacks jam-pack your server bandwidth and make it impossible for a genuine user to access that site or server. DoS (Denial of services) is a type of attack on a network that is aimed to bring a network to its knees by flooding it with useless traffic.
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a cybercrime and is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.
This is done normally by sending as many requests from the source as possible that may be from HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) or emails.
DoS vs. DDoS
A distributed denial-of-service attack is a subcategory of the more general denial-of-service (DoS) attack. In a DoS attack, the attacker uses a single internet connection to barrage a target with fake requests or to try and exploit a cybersecurity vulnerability. DDoS is larger in scale. It utilizes thousands (even millions) of connected devices to fulfill its goal. The sheer volume of the devices used makes DDoS much harder to fight.
Botnets
Botnets are the primary way distributed denial-of-service attacks are carried out. The attacker will hack into computers or other devices and install a malicious piece of code, or malware called a bot. Together, the infected computers form a network called a botnet. The attacker then instructs the botnet to overwhelm the victim’s servers and devices with more connection requests than they can handle.
One of the biggest issues with identifying a DDoS attack is that the symptoms are not unusual. Many of the symptoms are similar to what technology users encounter every day, including slow upload or download performance speeds, the website becoming unavailable to view, a dropped internet connection, unusual media and content, or an excessive amount of spam.
Further, a DDoS attack may last anywhere from a few hours to a few months, and the degree of attack can vary.
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