Can you ignore DDos attacks?
Earlier this year, users of an online community for sharing presentations were unable to access the site and upload their presentations for 48 hours. It seemed to be that a large botnet (network of infected computers) was trying to take down the site by saturating the network connection to the site’s hosting provider. The website was experiencing a heavy distributed denial of service (DDos) attack.
A DDos attack is one in which hackers gain control of PCs secretly and remotely to bombard a specific IP address with a torrent of data, which can overwhelm web servers and flood a company’s connections to the internet. The deluge of incoming messages to the target system forces it to shut down, denying access to the system by legitimate users. This results in the inability to maintain efficient communications and connectivity. Ultimately, it can affect business operations or stop the online business altogether.
