Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are a particularly pernicious form of cyberattack where the bad actor seeks to take down a web site or even an entire corporate network by flooding it with malicious traffic.
DDoS attacks have been around for years – and many cybersecurity vendors have risen to the challenge, bringing increasingly sophisticated DDoS mitigation technologies to market.
The bad actors’ response is woefully predictable: increasingly advanced approaches to DDoS, leading to an escalating cat-and-mouse game, as enterprises and governments seek to stay ahead of the deluge of bad traffic hitting their networks.
Bring in the Bots
DDoS attackers use numerous Internet protocols, from the HTTP at the core of the web to simpler, lower-level protocols that do little more than request a brief acknowledgement from a server as part of an ongoing interaction. Request too many acknowledgements at one time, however, and the server can bog down.
At the next level of sophistication, hackers send such malicious requests from a ‘spoofed’ IP address, fooling the target server into sending a response to a different server, which is the true target. In this way, hackers dupe unwitting organizations into playing a role in the attack, while the victim only sees traffic from presumably trustworthy sites or services, thus amplifying the effect of an attack by a factor of one hundred or more.
DDoS attacks, however, have reached an even higher level of sophistication, as hackers are now able to compromise millions of computers, smartphones, and even Internet of Things (IoT) devices like security cameras and baby monitors, recruiting these devices into botnets that can launch increasingly massive, unpredictable attacks on global targets.
Read the entire article at https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2019/02/12/are-hackers-winning-the-denial-of-service-wars/.
Intellyx publishes the Agile Digital Transformation Roadmap poster, advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, NETSCOUT and ThousandEyes are current Intellyx customers. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Christoph Scholz.
