{"id":4374,"date":"2016-01-19T12:00:25","date_gmt":"2016-01-19T18:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.poweradmin.com\/blog\/?p=4374"},"modified":"2016-01-04T16:16:33","modified_gmt":"2016-01-04T22:16:33","slug":"how-to-prepare-for-a-ddos-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.poweradmin.com\/blog\/how-to-prepare-for-a-ddos-attack\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Prepare for a DDoS Attack"},"content":{"rendered":"

With much of today\u2019s commercial activity conducted via the Internet, it\u2019s no wonder that corporate entities find themselves the target of assault by online intruders.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Cyber-attacks are now an accepted part of life \u2013 and it\u2019s up to administrators and security officers to establish how best to prepare and defend their organisations against them.<\/span><\/p>\n

DDoS?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS describes an attempt by malicious attackers to render a single computer, website, network server, or other network resource inaccessible to its subscribed or intended users. A DDoS attack generally involves an attempt to disrupt or disable the services provided by a host connected to the Net.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Distinct from other types of cyber assault, a DDoS attack targets the limitations of an IT system. Large organisations may be attacked using tools which are freely available and easy to use.\"DDOS_definition\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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A DDoS attack is typically launched from a multitude of compromised host computers, or zombies. A group of zombies forms a botnet, which in turn is administered by a host known as the command and control server. It\u2019s a resource-intensive process, and that\u2019s why the attack is spread (Distributed) amongst an army of botnets.<\/span><\/p>\n

Know Your Enemy<\/span><\/h2>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Some operating systems actually include the tools (like ping) necessary to mount a DDoS attack. Others (like HOIC or LOIC) may be freely downloaded from the Web. There\u2019s a thriving black market in these weapons, including botnet-as-a-service and rent-a-botnet.<\/span><\/p>\n

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One class of attack seeks to overload your network bandwidth, denying access to your services by legitimate users, who are squeezed out of the traffic flow. Another approach uses numerous small data packets to target a host, overwhelming its CPU with multitudes of cycles.<\/span><\/p>\n

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An older school of assault looks to bring down a network by targeting a specific device, and overloading its memory capacity.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Such direct attacks may cause relatively moderate damage, as the attacking host computers consume their own resources, to stage them. The zombies typically use their own publicly available IP addresses, and can be readily identified.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Indirect attacks amplify the effect of malicious zombies by redirecting traffic from them to other hosts, which reflect or magnify the assault, and can mask the identity of the true attacker. Often, the intermediate hosts are standard Internet providers, whose services are abused by the attacker for this purpose.<\/span><\/p>\n

Know Their Motives<\/span><\/h2>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Broadly, a DDoS attack may be motivated by any of the following:<\/span><\/p>\n