As the time is passing and technology is emerging the loopholes or security threat is turning out to be a strong point for concern. Many remain clueless as the methods for breach of securities are evolving at a high pace. It is always dependant on who holds the upper hand (Attackers or Defenders) in the scenario. Every time an expensive security method comes in the attackers is able to find the deficiencies and loopholes of the system.

The Emerging:

• As we discussed the threats a common one we can encounter is a DDOS attack. It has emerged from the DOS attack where the attacker overloads the server with an external communication request which results in the victim unable to respond due to legitimate traffic.

• DDOS can be said the updated version of the above where the server is attacked by not just one but many attackers which takes the difficulty or complications to a whole new level.

• There have been many instances where DDOS attacks have toppled down whole corporations or even web hosting companies. Here, the attacker can take control and use any computer including yours to attack.

DDOS refers to – Distributed Denial Of Service.

It is distributed here because multiple computers are used to carry this Denial Of Service. You may think that these attacks will be targeted only on the huge and important websites like banks and others, but you never know when any of your strong competitors can adopt this method to bring your business down. In some cases, hackers target small websites in order to practice their skills.

How to identify the attack?

It is a challenging task as one can hardly separate these attacks from genuine traffic. Many technical aspects like server disruption, maintenance process, etc can be mistakenly taken as DOS attacks.

But there are some symptoms you can notice:

• A sudden and drastic increase in the amount of spam you get.

• Inability to access websites

• Abnormal behaviors of the network like automatically opening the files, accessing websites, etc.

• Constant unavailability of specific websites.

How to protect your website from this:

A harsh reality is that there is no full-proof method to avoid these attacks. But there are some strategies that can help us with the same. Following are some:

• First and most common is acquiring and maintaining adequate anti-virus software.

• As this is a problem generated by traffic, the ultimate guide to avoid this is considering the Firewall service in order to restrict and have a check at the traffic entering.

• Adopting and practicing good preventive measures while distributing your email, applying email filters is also a good option.

• Lastly but the most effective one is to retain the service of a reputed web hosting with full prove methods of tackling DDOS attacks in place of some inexpensive web hosters with low-security measures.

DDOS Protection Cloudflare:

Cloudflare Inc is a USA based company having a registered office at San Francisco in California. It provides the following services:

• DDOS Protection

• Domain name server

• Reverse Proxy

• Content delivery network

• Web application firewall

Protection from DDOS at Cloudflare:

• Cloudflare claims that it has successfully defended the attack of Spamhaus which is publicly stated as the largest DDOS attack in internet history.

• Cloudflare is also reported to absorb the attack over 400 GBT’s from an NTP reflection attack.

• Cloudflare offers an “I’m under attack mode” services for its customers. It has a strong claim that this service will help them mitigate the advance layer 7 attacks.

• The above action is done by presenting a javascript computational challenge that the user is required to fulfill in order to access the website.

• Their efficiency is proved and trusted by its 55,00,000 customers over different industries.