DDoS Protection Strategies and Benefits

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is one of the most common ways to hamper working of a website. The DDoS attack is able to bring down any  website and forbid the genuine traffic from accessing your website. There have been innumerable cases where many reputed organisations, ecommerce websites, banks, financial institutions and other information with frequent visitors have incurred huge losses due as a by-product of a DDoS attack.

DDoS attack can be made to any and every website and pose a threat to the brand, its online presence and break the whole business chain. It is a cyber-attack that needs special attention and special measures to combat the attack by having DDoS protection in place.

Let us first begin by understanding how a DDoS attack is actually happens:

DDoS attack is primarily aimed to bring down the website by crashing it with illicit traffic. The website is exposed to a huge traffic that is not genuine and which takes up all the space on the bandwidth and on the server. This load on the website makes it unreachable to the genuine visitors thus denying them service. Thus it is termed as Denial or Service (DoS).

The service can be denied due to:

• Crashing of the server
• Blocking of a certain web page online
• Inaccessible URL
• The website being unavailable
• Decreased uptime of the website
• The traffic being directed to an incorrect webpage

Posing so many threats, no business would want to be attacked by a DDoS attack. In fact businesses are keen to employee every DDoS protection measure that is there to make sure that the Website is well equipped to battle any attempts made for DDoS attack. In case of falling prey to the DDoS attack, the website should be able to minimize losses and recovery quickly from the attack.

Let’s divide DDoS combat strategies into two parts: Prevention, fighting or Mitigation:

1. Prevention:

• The best way to deal with DDoS is by preventing it. The whole strategy of DDoS prevention is to monitor traffic.
• There are many protection agencies who are specialists in dealing with DDoS attacks. They provide a complete framework to secure your site against potential threats.
• The traffic that is allowed to access the website is filtered. Only the good traffic from the malicious one, and only the harmless requests are allowed to reach the site’s host server. This is how the DDoS protection techniques prevent DDoS attacks.
• You can either hire such companies and agencies or develop a team of experts in house to fight DDoS by preventing it at the first place.

2. Fighting:

• Fighting a DDoS attack is basically aimed at minimizing the losses caused by the attack. Whenever the DDoS attack is made to the website, the website is immediately turned down. The immediate response can be to divert the traffic to a proxy website or informing the regular visitors about the unavailability. This will avoid the confusion and chaos that is inherent to a DDoS attack.
• This step can again be strategized earlier. This can help in minimising losses and will give room for taking the further step of recovery. This is a one-time activity which can be devised by an expert. This is the go to plan to be executed once the DDoS attack is encountered.
  

3. Recovery:

• Recovery from any cyber-attack is not easy. It takes a lot of time and patience to regain the same traffic and same performance that was there before the attack.
• For smaller websites, this stage can take a few days while in some big websites, this stage can take a few years. It is difficult to recover from an attack as some damage like the damage to the server or data, can sometimes be undoable.

Benefits of having a DDoS protection mechanism:

• You can be stress free about your website’s security and concentrate on your business and other aspects.
• A secured website is an asset for your website. You can leverage on it and increase your profits.
• A website is very important branding and web presence tool. It is very important to have a website that up all the time and caters to all the requests made on the website.
• Saving the cost that is incurred during the recovery, both intangible and tangible.
• A DDoS protection team can also identify other threats and thus make you able to secure your website from other threats.
• A DDoS protected web hosting server is the best strategy as it will ensure that the web server is more secured.

A DDoS attack can be very lethal attack and it is advisable to be prepared to face the attack. Having a DDoS protection team either hired or housed is a better option. It is vital to have a DDoS protection strategy right from the start.