DDoS Extortion Attack Explained

DDos2A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack happens when a malicious group in possession of a large botnet starts sending an never-ending stream of connection requests and other types of traffic in order to overwhelm your web server, ecommerce operations, or other web connect assest.  Often the motive for these attacks are to extort money from the targeted victim, but sometimes these attacks may be social or politically motivated as well.

A recent article in TechRepublic does an excellent job showing an actual example of a recent attack against a financial services company.  In this example they were able to withstand the attack with the help of some rather expensive security services.  If your operations a re smaller, you may be unable to afford these solutions, and find yourself ill-equipped to survive an attack like this one.

I would recommend taking a look at the article if you want to know what the targeted organization did that foiled the DDoS attack, but basically it involved working with a company that was able to filter all their traffic, discarding the bogus traffic, and passing along the valid requests.  This was very effective, but not inexpensive.

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About the Author:

I am a cybersecurity and IT instructor, cybersecurity analyst, pen-tester, trainer, and speaker. I am an owner of the WyzCo Group Inc. In addition to consulting on security products and services, I also conduct security audits, compliance audits, vulnerability assessments and penetration tests. I also teach Cybersecurity Awareness Training classes. I work as an information technology and cybersecurity instructor for several training and certification organizations. I have worked in corporate, military, government, and workforce development training environments I am a frequent speaker at professional conferences such as the Minnesota Bloggers Conference, Secure360 Security Conference in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, the (ISC)2 World Congress 2016, and the ISSA International Conference 2017, and many local community organizations, including Chambers of Commerce, SCORE, and several school districts. I have been blogging on cybersecurity since 2006 at http://wyzguyscybersecurity.com

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