#WeekendWisdom 084 Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Welcome to #WeekendWisdom number 84. This week we’re going to talk about Distributed Denial of Service Attacks.

What are distributed denial of service attacks?

A denial of service attack is where a bad actor will use some thing to deny you access to some other service. So for example, a ransomware incident, is where the criminals, they are using ransomware to deny you access to the service of your computers.

A distributed denial of service attack is slightly different in that the criminals are going to use many, many, many thousands of devices that they control that are called bots and they’re all in this kind of thing that they call a botnet.

What can a botnet do?

It is then used to target an online service or application that your business depends on. Thus they flood it with requests which therefore then drowns out any legitimate requests that you’re trying to put there to make use of that service.

So how can you prevent this type of thing?

Well usually your internet service provider or your application service provider may have some facilities that they can use that control these type of distributed denial of service attacks. So you should contact them if you are in such a situation. It costs money but it’s well worth it if you want to get access back to your online service.

You can refer back to #WeekendWisdom number 76 where I talked about connecting cheap devices to the internet which don’t have really good security on them and these are usually the devices that make up these botnets.

So that’s it for this week. Lets be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.