This Attack Was Different
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks isn’t new.
This time, it’s different.
Past DDoS attacks targets mostly a single website. Last weekend’s attack went after a middleman, a little-known company called Dyn.
Dyn is something like a telephone directory for the internet. When you load Amazon.com, for example, your computer sends a request to servers managed by companies like Dyn, which route your request to Amazon so you can go shopping.
But by targeting Dyn, hackers did much more damage than past attacks. Instead of blocking access to one site, a lengthy list of sites and services were inaccessible.
Why This Matters to You
Cloud-based services have become central to how many businesses do business. As we saw last week, if you use Dropbox, Google Drive, Gmail, Office 365, Slack, or any other cloud-based service to run your business, it could be gone in an instant.
When attacks happen, you have no promise of when you’ll regain access to your files and data. Your access could be blocked for a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, or even longer.
Besides the monetary lost, sales, leads or a decrease in any conversion goal you’re trying to achieve, you also need to worry about the loss of traffic due to the drop of your Google rankings.
Matt Cutts, speaker for Google Public Relations confirmed that being down for more than 15 minutes will affect your website ranking in some way. Google ranks a website based on what it finds while it crawls the website, so if it doesnt find anything, it can’t rank or reindex it.
If you use cloud services to power your website or store your files, you’ll need to plan ahead with certain protection.
Keeping your website secure is like adding extra reinforcements to your castle. The more you build up your fortifications, the better protected you’ll be against potential threats.
The good news is because you’ve invested in our maintenance program, you’re already one step ahead in shoring up your site’s armor to prevent intruders from breaking in and causing havoc.
Together with our engineers, we’ve built many defensive mechanisms into our technology to defend your WordPress site from vulnerabilities. Our security environment includes real-time security threat detection, managed patching and updates for WordPress core, along with infrastructure security audits and plugin updates.
Using Cloudflare to avoid DDoS
One of the tools we’ve deployed is to use Cloudflare to avoid DDoS. If you’re not sure about your WordPress Website Maintenance plan coverage, please contact us.
A little more read about the attacks on StarHub, 22, 24 Oct and Dyn, 21 Oct 2016
Credit: Partial contents extracted from theguardian and The Straits Times.
On Saturday, 22 October 2016 and Monday, 24 October 2016, StarHub suffered distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on its Domain Name Servers (DNS).
It’s broadband customers were affected by disruptions lasting about two hours each. DDoS attacks work by having thousands of infected computers accessing and overwhelming a targeted site, causing a spike in traffic.
At a larger scale, on 21 October 2016, Dyn, a company that controls much of the internet’s domain name system (DNS) infrastructure was hit. It remained under sustained assault for most of the day, bringing down sites including Twitter, the Guardian, Netflix, Reddit, CNN and many others in Europe and the US. The recent DDoS attack on Dyn that disrupted internet was one of the largest of its kind in history, experts said.
Image source: Wikipedia
Read more about Dyn Analysis Summary Of Friday October 21 Attack, StarHub’s Media Statement and 2016 Dyn cyberattack.
At Krome, we specialise in website design and development services. If you or your client are interested in creating a site, it’s time to tell us about your project or have a chat about what we can do. You can contact us here.