DDoS Attacks risks, How to protect your website from DDoS Attacks

DDoS Attack is one of the most popular and frightening attacks of cybercriminals, It is used to attack websites, It is accomplished by flooding the website servers with traffic that exceeds what the servers or bandwidth is capable of, The hackers target the sites or the services such as the banks, credit card payment gateways, but also business or personal websites for revenge, blackmail, and activism.

DDoS Attacks

DDoS (distributed denial of services) attack makes your website unavailable for visitors interrupting or suspending services of the web host company connected to the Internet, It is the most popular and easiest way to hack a website, DDoS attacks are distributed attacks of a DoS hack where are involved more than one unique IP addresses.

DDoS attack is an illegal activity, It becomes a nightmare for companies with an active online presence, If your website goes down due to an overload of website traffic, you are a victim of the notorious distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

There is a list of symptoms for DDoS attacks, but it isn’t too accurate because the same symptoms may appear if your web host has hardware or Internet issues: When the website suffers from unusually slow loading of the website or the features of the website, unavailable website connection, the unusually high number of emails received, unusually a high number of accounts, posts, topics & other spam activities.

How to protect your website against DDoS Attacks?

There are many ways to protect your website from DDoS attacks such as choosing the proper Internet Service Provider (ISP) that has the proper hardware and has a contract agreement with your web host, ISP offers DDoS mitigation, so you can maximize up-time and protect your network links.

You can protect your website by having a cloud mitigation provider that offers you DDoS mitigation from the cloud has a lot of bandwidth and mitigation capacity and your data will be safely saved in one or more internet clouds, Cloud mitigation providers have a team composed by security engineers and researchers who are working to protect their customers against DDoS attacks.

You can use the routers, the switches, and the firewalls, They can stop simple ping attacks and stop invalid IP addresses filtering non-essential protocols & they provide automatic rate limiting, You should change the configuration of your switches & routers such that they automatically reject packets coming from outside your network, You can focus on encrypting different sessions on your router to allow trusted hosts who are outside your network.

You have to set up secured VPS Hosting, Many businesses opt for the lowest price hosting plans available in the market, While the initial cost is low, the threat of a DDoS attack is outrageous, Setting up a secured VPS hosting offers DDoS protection and reduces the probability of an attack, The Virtual Private Network is the service that will connect your website to an offsite secure server.

You should create an action plan in advance, You have to use the sensors that send an alert whenever the website is down, and in case of any malicious activity, dump the logs quickly, You have to consider contacting your ISP to understand the free and paid DDoS protection plans, You should confirm the DNS TTL ( time-to-live ) for the systems that can be attacked in the future.

You can protect your website by having properly configured server applications, you can minimize the damage of the DDoS attack, especially if an administrator defines what resources an application can use and also makes real-time updates in case of an attack.

You can use an intrusion-detection system (IDS) to detect anomalies regarding traffic, but this isn’t an automated system and you need manually to activate it, You can buy excess bandwidth that can handle various spikes in the traffic, You should monitor traffic levels as the DDoS attack brings an unprecedented amount of traffic to your server, which spikes the traffic beyond your imagination.

You can use an application front-end hardware that analyzes the data packets and identifies the regular, priority, or dangerous ones, You can use DDS-based defense that can block the connection-based DoS attacks and address protocol attacks.

You can protect your website by having a cleaning center that uses various methods such as proxies, tunnels, and circuits separating legitimate traffic from bad ones, You can use the IP verify unicast reverse path that verifies each packet received for DDoS attacks.

You can dump the logs because your web server logs can’t tell the difference between good traffic and bad traffic and the log files are becoming too large, You can capture evidence using a Linux workstation that can process the flow of packets and the snoop program to capture them.

Many software can help you protect your website against DDoS attacks such as CloudFlare which offers protection against DoS attacks of all forms and sizes, CloudFlare defended more than 2 million websites and the largest DDoS attack stopped was about 600Gbps.

You can use a DDoS Protector that blocks DoS attacks within seconds with multi-layered protection and it presents up to 40 Gbps of performance, It uses new techniques and traditional ones to block many attacks that have advanced challenge techniques, behavioral protection, and automatic signatures.

FortiWeb Application Firewall comes with multiple DoS & DDoS-specific protection policies, network and application layer protection, HTTP and HTTPS protection, sophisticated botnet challenge and response protection, and Geo IP Analysis, FortGuard Anti-DDoS Firewall has the most accurate highest performance protection against attacks, built-in IPS, protection against SYN & arp spoofing.

You can use Secure64 DNS Authority which has DNS DDoS mitigation protecting DNS servers and bandwidth, Secure64 DNS Authority can detect the high volume of DDoS attacks allowing you to ensure the availability of your DNS while the attacks, it can eliminate the over-provision and the need for dedicated network security equipment.

Hackers find their way through connected devices to disrupt the services of a brand, For stronger DDoS protection, change the passwords of the devices regularly, You should switch off the devices when not in use & verify every device before connecting it.

You should ensure that you have extra Bandwidth because over-provisioning your bandwidth offers extra time to identify & deal with the attack, It allows the server to accommodate unprecedented spikes in traffic and to lower the intensity of the attack.

You should train the customers on security because hackers target computers with weak passwords, You should filter UDP traffic with remote blackholing that can effectively stop undesirable traffic from entering a protected network, Security plugins optimize your website to minimize DDoS risk, WordFence is a great choice, as it is Bulletproof Security.

DDoS attacks have the potential to create havoc on your business and you need to stop the traffic from false sources at any cost, You have to focus on using the access list at the perimeter of the network to prevent malicious activities.

Purchasing a dedicated hosting server will offer more bandwidth, control over security, and countless resources, With a dedicated server as your first layer of defense, you can successfully run your online site with thousands of legitimate customers without worrying about anything and you have to block spoofed IP addresses.

You have to create an access control list (ACL) to deny all inbound traffic with a particular source IP, You can focus on using reverse path forwarding (RPF) or IP verification, It works similarly to an anti-spam solution, You can filter both outbound and inbound traffic to enhance DDoS protection.

Installing updates on open source platforms like WordPress as soon as possible mitigates the risk of attack because the potential security loophole is filled with an update, You can set up RST Cookies, the server sends incorrect ACK + SYN to the client, and then the client forwards the packet telling the server about the potential error, So, it prevents the business from the potential attack.

You have to monitor half-open connections, by adding an empty keep-alive message to the application protocol framing, You should use proxy protection, It offers an extra layer of DDoS protection for any website and keeps your website safe from complex cyber threats.

Cloudflare use, features, advantages and disadvantages

WordPress Website advantages and disadvantages

Free WordPress Themes features, advantages and disadvantages