{"id":2587,"date":"2014-01-06T18:44:48","date_gmt":"2014-01-06T18:44:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.365ezone.com\/?p=2587"},"modified":"2014-01-06T18:44:48","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T18:44:48","slug":"what-are-ddos-attacks-how-to-deal-with-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/365ezone.com\/blog\/what-are-ddos-attacks-how-to-deal-with-them\/","title":{"rendered":"What are DDoS Attacks & How to Deal with them"},"content":{"rendered":"

The internet is abuzz with talks of the recent outage faced by Domain Registrar Godaddy<\/a>. The outage was suspected to be because of a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (commonly known as a DDoS attack) that targeted Godaddy\u2019s DNS servers, affecting several websites as well as email services. (However, a recent statement by Godaddy mentions that it was an internal network error that caused the interruption in services)<\/em><\/p>\n

DDoS attacks are a fairly common occurrence on the internet and are something we\u2019ve experienced in the past as well. Here is some more information on DDoS attacks, who they affect and how we mitigate such attacks.<\/p>\n

What is a DDoS attack?<\/strong>
\n\"\"<\/a>A Denial of Service attack<\/strong> aims to make a website unavailable to users by flooding the website\u2019s servers with an extremely high number of requests. These multiple incoming requests can make website resolution exceedingly slow and can even cause servers to crash.<\/p>\n

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack<\/strong> is essentially a DoS attack that originates from multiple sources. Such attacks are usually carried out using thousands of unsuspecting zombie machines known as botnets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

DDoS attacks have traditionally been used by cyber criminals to extort money from website owners that rely on the accessibility of their websites. However \u2018Hacktivists<\/em>\u2019 have also initiated such attacks in the past to bring down company and government websites in protest of certain policies or decisions.<\/p>\n

A \u00a0popular recent example is anonymous\u2019 attack<\/a> in protest of the Megaupload Raids that targeted various government and music industry sites.<\/em><\/p>\n

Who can it affect?<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>DDoS attacks are difficult to safeguard against completely and can affect large and small websites<\/strong> alike.<\/p>\n

Having suffered a DDoS attack on our DNS servers in the past, we understand that such attacks can occur and the best solution is to have systems in place that allow you to mitigate the attack and get systems back online as soon as possible.<\/p>\n

Which leads us to \u2013 How do we mitigate DDoS attacks?<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>While there isn\u2019t a lot that can be done to prevent DDoS attacks, there are certain techniques that we employ to mitigate DDoS attacks and restore services.<\/p>\n

To help mitigate DDoS attacks we\u2019ve employed the services of Prolexic Technologies<\/a><\/strong> that is a global leader in DDoS Protection & Mitigation. While there are multiple ways in which Prolexic helps mitigate DDoS attacks, here is a simplified version of how Prolexic works.<\/p>\n