Seems like every week there is a report of a new major hack. Doesn’t it?
Within the past couple months, we have seen North Korea, Spamhaus and The New York Times all fall victim to hacks. The targets are varied as are the motives but many of them show one thing in common, A Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS method by the proper traitors.
In the recent times it has become one of the favorite methods of anonymous folks to target. DDoS attacks have dramatically changed over the past few years. Attacks last longer than weeks or months and some organizations are constantly under attack.
The recent victim of this attack was Github. Its highly unpleasing to announce that GitHub has become a target of the largest known cyber-attack in history of mankind.
The web hosting service revealed that the attack took place earlier this week on February 28th and they are saying this was a massive DDoS attack that was designed to bombard the website with enough traffic to put them offline. They said in this attack the attackers took over a memory system known as mem-caching.
And by this they amplified the volume of data that it was sending to GitHub by a factor of 51,000. This means that for each byte that was sent by the attacker up to 51 kb was sent towards the target. In the end the platform was getting hit with beats at 1.35 terabyte per second at its peak.
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This attack lasted for over 8 minutes. GitHub stated that no one’s data was compromised in this but as of now they are saying it’s the largest known attack.
How to Prevent and Stay Protected from DDoS?
As we know that it’s impossible to completely prevent and stay protected from DDoS attacks. Although there are some security measures that can be taken to help you prevent the attack.
1. Study Traffic Levels
The major process in making the attack stop is to immediately detect when the attack is about to happen. The efficient way to make this possible is to keep studying your website’s traffic chart. By doing this you will get to know about the fluctuation in your website during the peak times. Once you are done studying the traffic levels, setup the threshold limit to your website that will immediately inform you and your security team about the traffic level if exceeded the limit.
2. Stay in Contact With your ISP
When selecting the Internet Service Provider, DDoS protection should be there on your directory. Many ISPs provide DDoS protection and some don’t. If your ISP is not providing you the DDoS protection, then during a DDoS attack you should ask your ISP to reroute the traffic from your website. So that the load on your website comes to low and an attack can be prevented.
3. Get Additional Bandwidth
Getting an additional bandwidth won’t help you preventing the attack from happening. But getting extra bandwidth will give you more time for reacting and preventing the attack. As we know, by DDoS the website is flooded with bulk traffic. But if you have additional bandwidth, you will get least affected as your website will take lesser part of the attack and will give you enough time to mollify the effects of attack.
4. Buy Cloud DDoS Protection
The cloud DDoS protection providers could be expensive but they provide the effectual cover of protection against the attack. The providers keep lots of additional bandwidth that helps them to assist more large DDoS attacks. They ensure only the legal request make it to your website, and rest of the illegal and false requests are filtered out.
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Organizations like Google offer their own legitimate and authentic DDoS prevention called Project Shield.
Now it’s understandable by the organizations how the attacks can be minimized and prevented. These preventions can save you from becoming a victim of the attack.
Please comment and provide your feedback if you found this helpful or have any suggestions!!
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