WHAT IS DDoS?
Distributed Denial of Service Attack...
DDoS attacks are targeted to Online services websites and web servers. Hackers have been using this power of the web from the beginning of 20s. This attack disrupts the normal traffic to a website or a server and performs multiple requests in order to compromise the efficiency of the web server. Eventually, The number of request exceeds the amount of traffic a server or a network can accommodate ultimately causing the server and the service to shut down. It Simply brings a Website down.
This attacking traffic includes incoming messages, Fake packets, connection requests etc.
WHY IS THIS DANGEROUS-
A website in todays world is all we need to fulfill our daily needs and perform various tasks including shopping, gaming, documenting, Cloud Storage and most importantly, Banking. A server shutdown even for a couple of minutes is absolutely devastating. To explain easily, transactions worth $240,000 are done Venmo Every Single minute, now imagine servers going down while the transactions still pending. Ultimately it will cause a huge loss to both the consumers and the company.
In Ecommerce, a estimated transaction of $1 Million occurs every Minute. Now its not hard to tell why DDoS can be so Devastating.
HOW HACKERS USE IT-
In 2000, Michael Calce, a 15-year-old boy who used the online name “Mafiaboy,” launched one of the first recorded DDoS attacks. Calce hacked into the computer networks of a number of universities. He used their servers to operate a DDoS attack that crashed several major websites, including CNN, E-Trade, eBay, and Yahoo. Calce was convicted of his crimes in the Montreal Youth Court. As an adult, he became a “white-hat hacker” identifying vulnerabilities in the computer systems of major companies.
DDoS attacks do not specifically need to attack the server in real time, it is also used as a threat, demanding for a Ransom. For an Instance; in 2015-16 A Criminal group called The Armada Collective repeatedly extorted banks and web host providers to pay a Ransom through Cryptocurrency and as a denial of the Ransom, they would be attacking the servers of those banks.
DDoS is like a Unexpected Traffic jam clogging up the highway preventing the normal traffic from arriving at the destination. -By Cloudfare
WHERE THE TRAFFIC COMES FROM-
The traffic clogging the server comes from bots over the web. As bots are legitimate internet devices, it is difficult for the servers to detect and analyze the difference between bots and real traffic.
IDENTIFYNING A DDoS ATTACK-
- Huge amount of requests from a single IP address or a range of IP's.
- Suspicious and unnatural spike in the traffic and requests.
