Protecting Your Business Online
In today’s world of online shopping carts and digital ordering, businesses of all sizes face a wide variety of cyber threats, among which Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks loom large.
Imagine your website suddenly becoming inaccessible to customers or clients due to overwhelming traffic—not from legitimate users, but from malicious sources like botnets. This scenario is just one example of the many ways a DDoS or cyberattack can cause significant financial and reputational damage, especially to small businesses and freelancers who may lack robust cybersecurity measures.
Understanding and preparing for such threats is essential for safeguarding your online presence and business continuity. The first step is reading our comprehensive guide to DDoS attacks: what they are, how they can impact your business, and crucially, what steps you can take to protect yourself and your customers.
Understanding DDoS Attacks
A DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack is a malicious attempt to overwhelm your website with a flood of unwanted traffic. Think of it like a huge crowd of people trying to force their way into a tiny store. The legitimate customers can't get in, the employees are overwhelmed, and business comes to a screeching halt.
There are several types of DDoS attacks that can lead to website downtime or worse, and each one targets different components of a network infrastructure.
Volumetric Attacks
Volumetric DDoS attacks flood a network with a high volume of traffic, consuming bandwidth and making services unreachable.
Protocol Attacks
A protocol attack exploits weaknesses in network protocols, causing services to be disrupted by exhausting server resources.
Application Layer Attacks
When specific applications or services within the application layer are targeted, the attacker is aiming to crash the web server or disrupt access to applications.
Common Methods of DDoS Attacks
Like many types of cybercrime, digital attack techniques are constantly evolving. Attackers often leverage botnets—networks of compromised devices—to generate traffic, making attacks difficult to detect and even harder to mitigate. While constant change is the norm in the world of cyberattacks, there are several common methods we are aware of.
- A UDP flood is a large volume of User Datagram Protocol packets overwhelms the target network or server.
- An HTTP flood is when a large volume of seemingly legitimate HTTP requests are sent to a server, overwhelming it.
- DNS amplification involves a small number of requests are sent to DNS servers with spoofed source IP addresses, causing them to send large amounts of data to the victim’s IP.
- A Ping of Death attack sends an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packet larger than the standard size, causing crashes and other unexpected behavior.
- A Teardrop attack sends fragmented but overlapping IP packets. When the target system attempts to reassemble the packets, the system crashes.
- An ICMP flood sends a large volume of ICMP packets to a target server, overwhelming it.
- A Malformed Request attack is a category of attacks that use malformed requests to exploit vulnerabilities in servers or applications. Examples include BadSSL and XML Bomb.
- State Exhaustion Attacks aim to exhaust the resources of a server to track connection states, preventing legitimate connections. An example of this is a SYN flood.
- Router Attacks target network routers by exploiting vulnerabilities in firmware, causing them to crash or malfunction.
Be aware that DDoS attacks often combine a variety of methods to maximize their impact. Understanding the various ways your business can be targeted will help you spot DDoS attacks while they are in progress, and work to end them as quickly as possible.
Why Should You Be Concerned?
For businesses that rely on digital services, the impacts of a DDoS attack can be severe and long-lasting. They not only put your revenue at risk, but they can cause a serious change in how your brand is viewed when it comes to trust and security.
The Financial Impact
The revenue loss due to downtime can be immediate and substantial. Without a website, some businesses lose a significant portion of their daily sales. Others may be harmed by the damage done by lost local search traffic.
Reputation Damage
Trust and credibility suffer as customers experience service disruptions. Your website plays heavily into the perception of your business, so a website that refuses to load or that errors out during a customer’s visit is going to negatively impact their overall customer experience. Over even just a few days’ time, the number of customers who have a poor experience goes up, and your business never gets a second chance at a first impression.
Data Security Risks
During attacks, vulnerabilities may be exploited, potentially compromising sensitive information. This kind of breach risks not only your personal data, including financial information, but also the private data of your customers and vendors. That adds up to extra work for your business as you must first identify the specific information stolen and then notify those who were put at risk. (Losing your customers’ personal financial information is likely to have a negative impact on their loyalty to your business, too.)
Whether you’ve been subject to an attack yourself, or you’ve heard stories of malicious digital threats in the news, it’s easy to see how DDoS attacks can cause chaos for businesses and their customers alike.
Creating a Response Plan
When it comes to responding to a DDoS attack, preparation is your best defense. Developing a response plan tailored to your business can mitigate damage and speed up recovery. If you have a plan in place and ready to execute before an attack, it saves your team time and effort in the event one ever happens.
Here are a few components every good plan should have:
Communication Strategies
Establish clear communication channels to notify customers, internal teams, and possibly vendors during an attack, such as via a letter or email. Know (and document) who should do which task in case of an emergency and lean into your team’s skills. Ideally, the first person to respond to your computer network problem would be the employee who is most comfortable with computers.
It may also be helpful to have a draft of any necessary public communications written and looked over by your attorney ahead of any problems, allowing your company’s response time to be that much faster in protecting yourself from any additional liability.
Have all the necessary contact information and documents stored somewhere easily accessible so you can find them in the heat of an emergency.
Mitigation Steps
Outline procedures for minimizing service disruption and restoring normal operations swiftly. This could include rerouting your site traffic or increasing server capacity. An IT expert would be able to help you identify which methods your system could be vulnerable to and offer additional ideas on how to plan for next steps after an attack.
Take Action to Protect Your Website
Proactive measures can significantly reduce vulnerability to DDoS attacks. While the right protection for your business is unique to your specific needs, there are some universal steps you can take in order to reduce the risks:
- Choose the Right Hosting Service: Find hosting providers that are equipped to handle DDoS attacks.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN): Distribute traffic geographically across multiple servers to reduce the load on your primary server and lighten the impact of volumetric attacks.
- DDoS Protection Services: Invest in specialized services that detect and mitigate attacks in real-time.
Risk Assessment
Conducting a risk assessment helps to identify any vulnerabilities in your online system. Before you can properly protect your business online, it’s important to take a moment to see what your top cybersecurity needs are so you can fix any potential weak spots.
Evaluate server capacity and bandwidth limitations, then make the required changes to fill any gaps and raise your network’s resilience against DDoS attacks. You can utilize online tools or consult IT professionals for assistance.
Invest in Security
Ensuring your business is secure and prepared can make it harder for a cyberattack to be perpetrated. While security investments for DDoS attacks can be pricey, they yield long-term benefits including reduced downtime and revenue loss, heightened customer trust, and potential insurance savings when you demonstrate a robust security system.
Scalable Solutions
Scalable cloud-based solutions may be an option for your company to consider. The massive computing power available makes it easy for them to absorb a large amount of traffic, and the geographic distribution allows the load to be shared by multiple data centers rather than simply overwhelming one.
Protect Today to Guard Tomorrow
The threat of DDoS attacks demands proactive measures from businesses. By understanding the types and impacts of these attacks, creating a response plan, and investing in comprehensive security measures, you can mitigate risks and protect your business investment.
This comprehensive approach not only protects against DDoS attacks but also strengthens your business’s resilience in an interconnected marketplace. By prioritizing cybersecurity, businesses can thrive amidst digital challenges, ensuring reliable service delivery and customer satisfaction.