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Many find the holidays season exciting because they can relax, spend time with family and friends, and celebrate traditions. Additionally, most businesses have plenty to celebrate throughout the holidays since they usually have higher sales and acquire more recognition. Nevertheless, in this favorable context for most companies, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) assaults are an unfortunate festive custom that cybercriminals look forward to celebrating over the holiday season.
Overall, the frequency of ransomware attack attempts jumped by 70% between November 2021 and January 2022, as reported by Darktrace. Hackers know that during the holiday season, businesses are more willing to pay a ransom to avoid losing valuable data or experiencing operational disruptions. Help AG, the cybersecurity division of Etisalat Digital, revealed in their State of the Market Report 2021 that there were over 10 million DDoS assaults worldwide in 2018, with the UAE seeing a stunning 183% rise to 110,000 incidents.
Why Do DDoS Attacks Occur?
DDoS assaults may be motivated by financial gain, competitive advantage, or political objectives. Attackers will hold a site's functionality for ransom and demand money to end the assaults and restore sites and servers to operate.
There are several motives for DDoS attacks, and among them are:
- To obtain illegal access to sensitive data.
- To blackmail the server owner for financial gain.
- To show that the website or server is vulnerable to assault
- Facilitating political ends
- Competition in hacking between hackers and penetration testers
- Revolting against something or seeking notoriety
Currently, cybercriminals are increasingly combining DDoS assaults with other extortion tactics, such as ransomware (termed triple extortion ransomware), to exert more pressure and demand larger payments. Hacktivism, sometimes known as politically motivated assaults, is increasingly used to undermine political processes.
According to Securelist, the second quarter of 2022 witnessed a sharp rise in the number of superlong assaults. These are so long-lasting that websites are constantly under pressure. This compared to the preceding quarter when DDoS assaults and hacktivist attacks by amateurs almost ceased to exist.
How Can Enterprises Recognize a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS ) Attack?
The most apparent indication of a DoS assault is persistent network issues. However, there are more warning signals to watch for:
- More spam than usual.
- Loss of network connection between devices on the same network.
- Slow website speed with failed page loading.
- The inability of employees to access network-stored data or websites.
Best Methods to Tackle DDoS Assaults
Stopping an active DDoS assault may be difficult and might have adverse effects on your genuine users. Therefore, it is essential to adopt a preventive strategy.
- Be Proactive in your DDoS Protection - Although it is impossible to avoid altogether being the victim of a DDoS attack, taking preventative measures and making enough preparations might help you mount a more successful defense against such an assault. Determine which of your company's apps are connected to the internet, and then analyze the possible dangers and flaws associated with those applications. It is critical that you have a solid understanding of how your application should normally behave to be ready to take corrective action if it does not behave as anticipated.
- Formulate a DDoS Response Strategy - It is essential to have a response plan that can assist you in recognizing DDoS assaults, mitigating their effects, and fast recovering from them. Having a well-prepared DDoS response team with defined tasks and responsibilities is essential. This DDoS response team must be able to recognize attacks, take preventative measures against them, and monitor them, as well as communicate effectively with both internal stakeholders and external customers.
- Penetration Testing - The best approach to assess your readiness for a DoS attack is to conduct a penetration test. This is a regulated kind of hacking in which a professional tester attempts to breach your systems using the same methods as a criminal hacker. In this scenario, the tester will try to overwhelm your systems or exploit vulnerabilities to hinder your servers. If they are successful, the tester will offer thorough comments on how the attack was feasible and recommendations for mitigating the danger.
- Vulnerability Assessment - Understanding the nature of a DDoS assault is an efficient method of defending against one. Vulnerability assessment is the process of assessing a network for any flaws that might result in data loss or outages. A vulnerability evaluation may be performed manually or using assessment tools.
- Minimize Attack Surface Area - Reduce the surface area that may be assaulted, restricting attackers' choices and enabling you to construct solid defense layers in a single location. We want to verify that our application and resources are not exposed to ports, protocols, or apps from which they do not anticipate contact, resulting in reducing potential attack vectors and allowing us to focus our mitigation efforts. Sometimes, it is possible to do this by putting your resources behind Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) or Load Balancers and limiting direct Internet access to specific components of your architecture, such as your database servers. In other circumstances, you may use firewalls or Access Control Lists (ACLs) to regulate the traffic that enters your apps.
Find the Best Cyber Partners to Tackle Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attacks
During the holiday seasons, DDoS attacks become more prevalent, and for most enterprises, it might be overwhelming to prevent and combat them without assistance. Truvantis is here to help you in this pursuit, so contact us to find out how to deploy the best cyber measures against DDoS attacks: https://www.truvantis.com/contact-us
About Truvantis
Truvantis® is a cybersecurity consulting organization providing best-in-class cybersecurity services to secure your organization's infrastructure, data, operations, and products. We specialize in helping our customers improve their cybersecurity posture by implementing, testing, auditing, and operating information security programs.
