Factors to Consider When
Choosing a DDoS Protection Service
Distributed denial-of-service attacks, often known by their acronym DDoS, are one of the most pressing cybersecurity concerns that modern businesses face. While DDoS attacks are not as severe as a direct breach, their repercussions can be equally grave.
Businesses that don’t protect themselves from DDoS attacks could see their website become inaccessible to customers, internal servers being overloaded, and operations being brought to a standstill. DDoS protection is vital in the modern age of cybersecurity and is one of the first major pieces of cybersecurity infrastructure that a business should invest in to enhance their security posture.
In this article, we’ll explore the importance of DDoS protection, touch on the key elements of effective solutions, and demonstrate why your business should protect against DDoS attacks.
The Importance of DDoS Protection
DDoS attacks can render a business of any size completely inoperable. DDoS attacks utilize a huge number of bot devices to overwhelm a company’s servers with traffic. Once in an overwhelmed state, the servers cannot do anything, unable to process requests, deliver data, or send updates.
Cybercriminals that use this strategy can incapacitate a company for as long as they’d like. Typically, they’ll demand a ransom fee from the organization in return for stopping the botted traffic. Of course, as a company is completely unable to continue with business during these outages, they normally have to accept the ransom demands, as otherwise they’ll hemorrhage money by not being able to contact customers or finalize sales.
Even the most prolific businesses in the world are still susceptible to DDoS attacks. Considering the size and scope of these companies, they often focus on other cybersecurity defenses, leaving the door open for DDoS attacks to occur. Most recently, Microsoft experienced DDoS attacks that hit Outlook, ONeDrive, and Microsoft Azure, disabling these services for customers on different days.
DDoS attacks are easy to launch for hacking groups and can be extremely profitable if they encounter a business with no or ineffective DDoS protection. Medium-sized businesses are often the most lucrative targets, as they’re unlikely to have an enterprise-level security solution but could still fetch a high ransom price.
Alongside your other security solutions, DDoS protection can offer a vital layer to keep your business safe from cyberattacks and common threat vectors.
Key Elements of DDoS Prevention Services
There are a huge number of DDoS protection services currently available for your business to choose from. However, it’s important to note that not all of these cybersecurity solutions are cut from the same cloth. DDoS is a blanket term that can refer to any number of attack strategies, meaning you should be sure that your provider covers you for everything you need.
Where possible, look for clarification about the types of DDoS attacks that providers cover and what their services entail.
When looking for a DDoS protection service, be sure it meets the following requirements:
- Scalable Services: One of the core aspects of a DDoS attack that makes it so powerful is the ability of a hacker to scale the attack to find the point of failure in your systems. A comprehensive DDoS protection service should be able to scale its defenses as an attack increases the pressure it applies.
- Diverse Protection: An effective DDoS protection service should be able to protect your business against all the various forms of DDoS attacks that could occur. For example, there are volumetric, protocol, and application layer DDoS attacks that your business should always be able to monitor and protect against. Be sure that your provider doesn’t only focus on one type of DDoS attack and instead covers a broad selection of potential attack vectors.
- Continuous Monitoring: DDoS attacks can happen at any time and for any number of reasons. Your DDoS protection provider should offer continuous monitoring with automated technologies to ensure that you are protected 24/7 without any outages or gaps in service. Especially with the growing usage of AI monitoring, there is no excuse for a non-continuous monitoring service.
- Rapid Detection: There are several threat markers that organizations can identify when a DDoS attack is in its earliest stages. Some DDoS protection services will only activate when the attack is already occurring, which may be too late. Be sure to look for DDoS protection services that can offer a zero-day style of protection, monitoring your business and instantly taking action if any suspicious traffic tries to connect.
The best DDoS prevention services on the market will count on all three of the above factors and more. Luckily, businesses have a wide range of potential selections when it comes to DDoS protection, meaning they can find a service that ticks all their boxes.
Protecting Against DDoS Attacks
DDoS attacks are a common attack vector that almost any cybercriminal group can access. Considering the widespread usage of low-defense IoT devices around the globe, there are now thousands of individual networks of compromised systems that hackers can use to launch precise DDoS attacks.
Instead of waiting for your company to be the next victim, it’s advisable that you seek out effective DDoS protection as soon as possible. Investing in cybersecurity solutions that have precise DDoS-first protection will enable your business to reduce the threat that this vector poses to almost zero.
While DDoS attacks can be powerful, the cybersecurity solutions modern businesses now have access to can eclipse the threat.
