Have you ever seen a website crash? Typically these things happen when there is a surge in demand – like a Black Friday sale, huge concert event, or release of a new video game console. There are so many people attempting to access the website, that is just fails from being overloaded. There are not enough resources to go around that it cripples the site, making it unusable.
There’s a cyberattack that uses the same principle. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks target businesses and exploit the same vulnerability. They flood it with internet traffic to overwhelm the system and force a failure.
Last year, the average DDoS attack lasted 50 minutes.
While not a long time at face value, that’s a long time if you think about it in terms of lost work hours, lost customers, and disgruntled relations. Downtime is costly no matter how you slice it.
Unfortunately, DDoS attacks are becoming more common, as well as more advanced. They are becoming bigger, more sophisticated, and last longer. At times, the attack is used as leverage to demand ransom to make the attacks stop.
The biggest ever DDoS attack was recently reported. This attack was not just one, but dozens of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks. The majority of attacks delivered 50-70 million requests per second. The largest one exceeded 71 million requests. That’s a lot of traffic requests hitting websites – every single second. It’s also 35% higher than the previously reported record of 42 million back in June of last year.
What’s the good news? This attack was actually stopped.
While these attacks are increasing, it is possible to mitigate them. Ensure that your security is up to date and working as it should be. Are your firewalls ready? Do you have DDoS monitoring and prevention in place? If you have any questions what this looks like for your business then reach out for a free 15 minute consultation.