You may not be familiar with the jargon a ‘DDos attack’ however you may be more familiar with the 2014 Christmas day attack that bought down the networks of both Xbox live and PlayStation, the TalkTalk attack or the highly publicised Ashley Madison case. One of the most vicious tools in cybercriminals toolbox is the ‘distributed denial of service’ attack, more commonly known as a DDos attack, taking some of the most protected systems/networks offline.
A DDos attack works by harnessing the power of a network of thousands of compromised computers or networked devices, known more commonly as a ‘botnet’, to then flood a website or systems servers with requests, leaving legitimate traffic unable to access it. Theoretically any computer can become a part of a botnet, hackers seek to find vulnerabilities within the computers operating systems to install malicious software, giving them constant remote access to the PC. Once a device has been compromised, it can be called into action immediately, from here the hacker will run a small program that will communicate with all of the devices that they control, then enabling them to flood a specific server or site.
This of course means no network or PC is excluded from the threat of being comprised or added to a botnet, should you or your business hold a significant number of PC’s or handle sensitive data and information It is imperative that you protect them to the best of your ability.
Here at borwell we strongly suggest that all businesses keep up to date with all software updates on all devices, ensure your business is protected with up to date anti-virus software, firewalls are in place to prevent unwanted access and most importantly that your staff are aware of what to look out for when using the company’s network and PC’s. On larger scale deployments specific methods can be implemented to try and mitigate the effects of a DDos attack.