What is a DDoS Attack?

DDoS is an abbreviation for the ever increasing threat that is a Distributed Denial of Service attack. In short, if your company is targeted by a DDoS attack you can completely lose communication over your entire Internet network, in turn causing significant damage to your company’s reputation and finances.

Essentially, hackers use numerous computers across the Internet under their control (called “bots”) to send floods of spurious traffic to a particular network thus causing major disruption in communication, bringing down devices and preventing lines of traffic in and out.

DDoS attack types can vary. Sometimes attacks are done through pure brute force, sometimes by targeting a weaker layer of a website and exploiting features. Sometimes it is both of those things to make it harder to stop. The end result is usually the same: the business is offline, and there’s no way to know for sure when the DDoS attack will end.

Why do I need to care?

Good question. These sort of things usually only unfold on a global scale, with huge corporations falling foul to hackers with a political agenda, right? Wrong.

Over 7,000 DDoS attacks are reported every single day. A lot of these reports are from much smaller companies than you would expect. In the region of 20% of all machines on the Internet have been compromised as “bots” at one time or another. Downtime can last hours, even days, losing your business tens, even hundreds, of thousands of pounds. Company share prices have been known to be affected by DDoS attacks.

The figures are staggering, and with DDoS attacks now available for hire for as little as a £130 a day (2014 pricing), it is certainly something to be taking very seriously and make provisions for proactively rather than waiting to be hit. For any company that requires guaranteed levels of Internet availability, DDoS protection is rapidly becoming a must-have service.

What can be done about it?

activereach offers a wide range of DDoS attack services to help monitor, report and protect against any DDoS threat that might be of concern.

Please browse our DDoS Mitigation & Protection and DDoS Testing solution pages to find out more.