DDoS: What is it and How Will it Affect My Business?

DDoS: What is it and How Will it Affect My Business?

You hear about it almost every day. Some large business, corporation, or government entity has suffered a “Distributed Denial of Service Attack”, or DDoS attack, and lost time and revenue due to an inability to continue to operate under such conditions. It’s happening with increasing frequency and intensity, and has now become a top concern for small and medium sized enterprise organizations all over the country.

To understand how a DDoS attack can cripple a network, it helps to know what one is. The attack can come in many forms but most often starts as a network of geographically distributed computers who were unwillingly enlisted into a virtual army, waiting for commands from the hacker to begin flooding their target.

You’ll commonly hear networks like this referred to as “bot-nets”, and these networks can produce floods of traffic anywhere from megabits to hundreds of gigabits depending on the number of nodes enlisted. Most bot-net administrators do not perpetrate attacks themselves, instead renting out their networks to clients who pay by the hour to utilize the service to attack.

As bandwidth and compute power has decreased internationally, the price of renting a gigabit botnet has reached an all-time low. This has created an environment wherein hacking service providers have resorted to marketing tactics, such as coupons and subscriptions, to lure customers away from competing services.

With a web-link and handful of US dollars, you too can rent enough power to bring a large public-facing entity to a grinding halt.

Coincidently, as bandwidth to small and medium businesses has increased, service-providers have had to support access to very fast circuits and switching networks to adapt. Therefore an attack at 500Mbps, that may cripple your Web server’s ability to communicate with the outside world, will not have any effect on your provider’s ability to continue operations.

Therefore, they are unlikely to step in to mitigate, or port, the traffic until you call to alert them of the malicious traffic. To them, you’re just using more of your already fast internet connection!

Axiom researchers have found that the number of DDoS attacks in 2014 was up approximately 90% over the prior year. In 2015 alone, we have already recorded a 100% increase in attacks over 300Mbps in comparison with 2014.
With the decreasing price of hacking tools, this increase in attacks will continue to become the new norm. Businesses of all sizes need to adapt to these new threats now in order to continue operating in the coming storm.

#FightBackWithAxiom

Axiom DDoS protection uses a proprietary security solution that denies the attacker information about your network and causing an increase in resource commitment on behalf of the attacker to in order continue their virtual volley. This not only allows you to continue business operations during an attack, but turns you into an undesirable target for any hacker. It makes them think twice about spending money to mess with you again.

Axiom Sentinel solutions come in different sizes and solutions. From Axiom Sentry devices with 500Mbps of mitigation capacity to our flagship Axiom Sentinel appliance, a sealed bridging appliance with 2 Terabit mitigated capacity, all Axiom solutions are designed to deal with the attack vectors of today while being adaptive and flexible enough to continue to secure your network for years to come.

For more information about Axiom Sentinel, feel free to call us about a capabilities presentation at (800)-519-5070

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