Last week, the United States woke up to a massive DDoS attack that took down almost half of the country’s major sites. Big websites like Twitter, Reddit, and Amazon were badly affected, and users couldn’t access them until about 7-8 hours into the day. This kind of attack shows how vulnerable even the biggest players can be to such attacks from a foreign land.
This also means that your devices are nowhere near safe from a DDoS attack and can be affected anytime. Here are some tips to help you prepare and get informed beforehand, to prevent yourself from a DDoS attack.
How to prepare for and deal with a DDoS attack
1. Find out whether there has been a DDoS attack
Although DDoS attacks are one of the most dreaded kinds, they are rather infrequent in nature. So, the next time your Internet goes down, check your connection before panicking over a potential attack. You can start by checking your router and troubleshooting your computer and network connection. You can also try visiting sites like CurrentlyDown.com to quickly determine if a particular service, like Twitter or Reddit, has an outage. These happen frequently, and they are rarely indicative of a DDoS attack.
2. Always keep a local backup on your hard drive
With the sudden increase in technological improvements, everything is going up in the cloud. And while this is extremely convenient to manage, it’s scary when there is a high probability of a DDoS attack. For example, if you use Google Docs for work, all your files are on the cloud. What’s more, Microsoft’s online version of Word doesn’t sync with your PC unless you have an active Office 365 subscription.
To be secure even when malware is on your machine, keep a local backup of all your important files—documents, media, photos—on an external hard drive. Repeat this process every week or couple of weeks.
3. Ask for help when needed
With attacks increasing year on year and no respite seen in the form of protecting systems from these attacks, it has all the more important to be in touch with a professional organization that knows its way around the problem. DDoS attacks are an expensive problem, but it’s simply the price you pay for hosting your business or interests on the Internet. Every minute your page can’t be opened, it is a direct drop in revenue that could have been gained in a normal situation. The protection should seem justified when you think about it that way.
4. Get ready to respond accurately and in time
If you are experiencing a DDoS attack, you probably won’t get enough time to respond to the situation before it takes over. All your services and applications will be downgraded or disabled, and reviving them swiftly will be your first action in the recovery process. Everyone works better during a crisis when there is a deadline to follow, with subsequent actions already laid out. Get a team together, discuss your response and write the plan down. Be prepared.
To learn more about what are DDOS attacks, what are the popular DDoS Methods & Attack Tools and about DDoS protection & prevention, read this post on Distributed Denial of Service Attacks.
