The number of annual DDoS attacks is steadily increasing year by year. It is estimated that in this year alone, the number of these attacks could be greater than 10 million. With that being said, it is essential that you understand what kind of preventive solutions and tactics you should implement to protect yourself and your business.
It doesn’t matter how big of a business you have. Many are misled to believe that just because they’re a small, upcoming business that they are not going to become a victim of a targeted DDoS attack. In reality, that’s not entirely true. The smaller you are, the more vulnerable you are to a DDoS attack. You may not be as desirable as some more successful businesses, but since your defenses are significantly easier to breach, you might become one.
On that note, we wanted to talk to you about some preventive and protective solutions you could take to shield yourself and your business from a potential cyber-attack. But, before we tackle the solutions, let us first discuss what a DDoS attack really is.
What Is A DDoS attack?
In a nutshell, a DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to block the business from operating by flooding its server with bad traffic, rendering the server unusable. Now, these attacks could be short or pretty long-lasting, depending on the attack itself. In some instances, a hacker would ask for ransom money to de-flood your servers and allow you to get back to business as usual, but we don’t want to do that.
We don’t ever want to wait for an attack to happen and then deal with it. Instead, we want to act preemptively and stop the attack from ever happening. This proactive, preemptive approach will save you a lot of trouble, so let us see just how you can do it.
1. Increase Your Bandwidth
This is what we’ve meant when we said you’re an easier target if you’re a small business. A server with a small hosting infrastructure is vulnerable to a malicious cyber-attack. It’s quite simple – the less bandwidth you’re working with, the easier it is for it to be flooded.
Therefore, your first preventive step would be to increase your bandwidth. This would significantly raise the bar a hacker would have to overcome in order to flood your servers and render them useless. However, according to https://www.l7defense.com/, this is only the first step, and it definitely isn’t enough to make your business DDoS-resistant.
2. Upgrade Your Network Security Infrastructure
As you probably know, there is no such thing as an impenetrable defense system. The closest we’ve come to a system like that is blockchain, but considering that’s an entirely different beast in technical terms, you can’t exploit that algorithm to improve your network security against a DDoS attack.
So, upon increasing your bandwidth, you should hire a team of IT experts to examine your security system and identify the loopholes that can be exploited by a hacker. Afterward, you, or better yet, a team of experts, should implement adequate solutions to fix those loopholes, improve the overall quality of your network security and keep it up to date for as long as you’re in business.
This would include basic security measures like firewall, anti-malware, and anti-virus software, among other things. On top of all that, every business should implement what is called a “multi-layer security solution”. To put it simply, this means decentralizing your data center into several locations so that if one falls victim to a cyberattack, the others can continue to work independently and uninterruptedly.
3. Switch To Cloud
While there’s still undoubtedly a need for physical servers, more and more companies are switching to the cloud. Switching to the cloud brings forth many benefits. For starters, it is much more cost-efficient to operate on the cloud than it is to invest in on-site server infrastructure. Also, it makes the whole operation run smoother and more effortless, mainly because of the features like remote, 24/7 access to your data from anywhere in the world.
On top of all that, cloud systems have been known to be far more secure compared to on-premise systems. They are usually much larger in scale, which automatically makes them harder to breach, amongst other things.
Another thing to keep in mind is the ultimate decentralization you get with switching to the cloud, which is arguably the greatest defense against a DDoS attack.
4. Invest In Security Software
Another neat thing that you can do to prevent a DDoS attack from happening is to invest in a security solution in the form of anti-attack software.
What programs like these do is to track, monitor and analyze your traffic data in real-time so that it can learn from it. This is what allows a program such as this to recognize and identify traffic patterns, which in return will enable it to recognize even the subtlest of changes in traffic, instantly preventing an attack.
Now, the architecture behind it is quite complex, and it wouldn’t be simple to explain in layman’s terms, but basically, a software like this would be able to recognize natural, organic traffic based on the data it has collected over time and compare it, in real-time, to the traffic that the server is currently experiencing. If there are some things that are appearing off-pattern or potentially malicious, the software will stop it before it could flood your network.
Now, there are some subtle and some not-so-subtle differences between these programs. Some of them are used solely for monitoring the traffic and would only alert you if there was something suspicious going on, while the others might actually implement some security measures once they would detect unusual changes.
Which one’s better for you is hard to tell, as it depends on various factors, so we’d always suggest consulting with your network security team about implementing new solutions such as these ones.
Conclusion:
There you have it. As far as we’re concerned, these are the things you should do in order to prevent a DDoS attack in 2024. Hopefully, you’ve found this to be helpful.
