A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is when a target, such as a server, website or network is overwhelmed with malicious traffic, causing it to slow down or go offline. These attacks threaten service availability, disrupt operations, and can even lead to financial and reputational damage.
To stay protected, organisations use tools and services that detect, filter and block harmful traffic, before it reaches their network – such as LINX Protect.
What Does DDoS Mean?
DDoS, stands for Distributed Denial of Service, and it is a form of a cyberattack that disrupts online services by overwhelming it with malicious traffic. Unlike DoS attacks, that come from a single device, a DDoS attack often uses BotNets – a network of compromised devices that generate a co-ordinated flood of traffic.
The distributed nature makes DDoS attacks harder to block, trace, and more disruptive.
How Do DDoS Attacks Work?
By overwhelming a target with more traffic than it can handle, DDoS attacks can cause resources to become overloaded and preventing legitimate users from access services. Through sending an overload of simultaneous traffic requests, this can impact multiple layers of a network, from bandwidth capacity to application performance.
DDoS attacks disrupt services by exhausting:
- Bandwidth: flooding the network connection with excessive traffic.
- CPU and memory resources: forcing servers to process more requests than they can handle.
- Application capacity: overwhelming specific services or endpoints with targeted requests.
How Can DDoS Attacks Be Impactful and How Can Networks Mitigate Them?
DDoS attacks are impactful because they target the availability of online services. When a system is flooded with more traffic than it can manage, it becomes slow, unstable or completely unreachable.
They can cause disruption in multiple ways, such as:
- Service disruption: a successful attack can take websites, applications or even entire networks offline.
- Financial loss: beyond lost sales, there are additional costs associated with investigation and recovery.
- Reputation damage: outages caused by downtime can impact user experience and perceived brand perception.
Networks can mitigate these risks by using a combination of monitoring, filtering, and automated protection systems designed to detect and block malicious traffic before it causes disruption.
How Can LINX Help Mitigate DDoS Attacks?
LINX Protect is our free dedicated DDoS mitigation service, designed to help keep networks secure and running smoothly.
Available to all members across all LINX LANs, it provides an efficient method to drop harmful traffic by using Remote Triggered Black Hole filtering to drop harmful traffic before it reaches your infrastructure. Minimising disruption, maintaining service availability and safeguarding your network.
Why choose LINX Protect for DDoS mitigation?
- Free for all members using LINX route servers
- Helps maintain uptime and service reliability
- Reduces the impact of malicious traffic on your network
For more information, visit our dedication DDoS mitigation webpage here.
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