By: Alexandria Addesso
Imagine your personal, business, or corporate computer servers completely flooded to the point that they cannot be accessed, halting any attempts at transactions on a given website. This could be crippling to a small business, devastating to a large corporation, and a threat to security for a government.
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is usually carried out by a group of hackers that create a swarm of false traffic to a website by commonly done by requesting information. This form of hacking is not done to steal user information or money but to cease business for a matter of time which would result in a lost of capital gains for the amount of time that the website is inaccessible.
“Well it's not that hard, there are places on the web you can acquire software that can do it with relative ease. Some of the more sophisticated software can be found on the dark web,” said IT specialist Eric Torres.
Just recently a DDoS attack was carried out against Australian Census Bureau's server. The site had to be immediately shut down to secure the integrity of the data. In the past two years there have also been DDoS attacks done against Irish and Thai government servers.
“Any server on the public internet is at risk. When a DDoS attack takes place basically you are overwhelming a particular system or systems with requests that it basically comes to a crawl or stop responding all together,” said Torres.
Even highly secure United States government servers have fell victim to DDoS attacks. In March 2015 a group of hackers connected to the twitter handle “ @Vikingdom2015” took down several government sites including Maine.gov and In.gov.
“We will knock all American government’s websites offline. We do not care if we get caught. We all like doing this. So you better be prepared for the battle,” said an audio clip on a SoundCloud account connected to @Vikingdom2015.
Although there is now a market out there of software to supposedly stop DDoS attacks, in reality every server online is at risk.
“Don’t connect to the internet,” said Torres. “Not connecting to server to the Internet may not be feasible and 99.9 percent of the cases but it's the only way almost guarantee you will not be attacked.”
Or at the very least, don’t piss off any hackers.
Imagine your personal, business, or corporate computer servers completely flooded to the point that they cannot be accessed, halting any attempts at transactions on a given website. This could be crippling to a small business, devastating to a large corporation, and a threat to security for a government.
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is usually carried out by a group of hackers that create a swarm of false traffic to a website by commonly done by requesting information. This form of hacking is not done to steal user information or money but to cease business for a matter of time which would result in a lost of capital gains for the amount of time that the website is inaccessible.
“Well it's not that hard, there are places on the web you can acquire software that can do it with relative ease. Some of the more sophisticated software can be found on the dark web,” said IT specialist Eric Torres.
Just recently a DDoS attack was carried out against Australian Census Bureau's server. The site had to be immediately shut down to secure the integrity of the data. In the past two years there have also been DDoS attacks done against Irish and Thai government servers.
“Any server on the public internet is at risk. When a DDoS attack takes place basically you are overwhelming a particular system or systems with requests that it basically comes to a crawl or stop responding all together,” said Torres.
Even highly secure United States government servers have fell victim to DDoS attacks. In March 2015 a group of hackers connected to the twitter handle “ @Vikingdom2015” took down several government sites including Maine.gov and In.gov.
“We will knock all American government’s websites offline. We do not care if we get caught. We all like doing this. So you better be prepared for the battle,” said an audio clip on a SoundCloud account connected to @Vikingdom2015.
Although there is now a market out there of software to supposedly stop DDoS attacks, in reality every server online is at risk.
“Don’t connect to the internet,” said Torres. “Not connecting to server to the Internet may not be feasible and 99.9 percent of the cases but it's the only way almost guarantee you will not be attacked.”
Or at the very least, don’t piss off any hackers.
