What This Year’s Massive DDOS Attacks Can Teach Us

2016 has been a momentous year for cyber security, especially after the massive DDoS attack on the DNS provider Dyn, which resulted in temporary downtime for several huge sites such as Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, Spotify, and Airbnb. This is a brave new world for cyber security in general, and businesses everywhere are concerned about whether their networks are vulnerable to attack. To shed some light on this growing issue, let’s break down for you what happened in the attack, what it means for businesses, and what you can do about DDoS attack protection in the future.

What Happened?

For those who are unclear, “DDoS” stands for “distributed denial of service”, which is a specific type of cyber-attack meant to disrupt a host’s services on the Internet. This is usually done by flooding the host with arbitrary and fake requests from IP addresses. This crashes the host and makes it unavailable to users, which is where the “denial of service” part comes from.

These attacks are “distributed” when they are conducted from multiple unique IP addresses. In the case of the Dyn attack, the attacker used a network of unsecured IoT (Internet of Things) machines such as toasters, laundry machines, dishwashers, and refrigerators, which were connected to the Internet.

With all of these unsecured machines, the attackers were able to flood Dyn with requests, which eventually overloaded it and brought it down. Dyn is a DNS provider, which is a system that translates domain names like Netflix.com and Amazon.com into IP addresses that specify where host servers are located.

All of these huge sites like Amazon and Netflix rely on Dyn for their DNS service. So due to the structural peculiarities of the Internet, the attacker was able to target a single service that many other companies rely on, bringing them all down at once. As such, this large and dramatic attack has everyone talking about DDoS attack protection once again.

Big Takeaways

Of course, the average business is not going to be able to do much about structural vulnerabilities on the Internet. However, what these DDoS attacks do demonstrate is that cyber-attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, effective, and dangerous to networks everywhere.

As DDoS attacks become more powerful, it will be increasingly easy for an average-skilled hacker to target and successfully attack a network of their choice, which could very well include your business and your customers. Now is the time to for businesses to look into DDoS attack protection.

Get Protected

Today businesses and customers are increasingly relying on information technologies and networks to interact with each other, and because of this, network integrity and functionality has become more important than ever. However, the importance of networks and Internet connections increases the threat of cyber-attacks like DDoS. To combat the increasing ingenuity and effectiveness of DDoS attacks, you need a set of cyber security tools that are advanced enough to meet the challenge.

NIC offers a suite of advanced DDoS attack protection tools to keep your business safe from hackers and cyber attacks. Our expert cyber security professionals are here to offer you advanced detection and elimination tools to help you beat back any threats that may arise. Give us a call at 1-877-721-3330 and get started today.