Denial of Service Detection (DoS Detection)

What are Denial of Services Attacks and how can I protect my business from hackers?

Despite the fact that you may not know what a Denial of Services Attack is, you likely have encountered one in the past. Basically, Denial of Service Attacks are initiated by hackers in an attempt to interrupt or negatively affect a computer resource. These resources can range from your businesses homepage, to a specific application that your company uses, to your email server, your voice mail, or even your network connectivity as a whole. There are many indicators to look for when you suspect that you are under attack. First and foremost you should be aware of your browsing speed. Are you experiencing unusually long delays as pages load? This is a sign that you may be under the attack of a hacker. Furthermore, irregular and continuous disconnects can prove to be a very good indicator of trouble. Another indicator of trouble is a distorted website. It is important to check your website frequently to ensure the site is functioning smoothly and nothing has changed. There is nothing more frustration to a consumer than navigating to a business’s website only to be faced with error messages. Although these attacks are not your fault you do have the ability to limit them as much as possible.

Now you may wonder how exactly these hackers make their attacks on your system. There are a variety of ways in which hackers can attack you (this is part of the reason why detection services must work constantly and in a variety of ways to monitor and block your computer from suspicious requests). One of the most common hacking procedures is to bombard your system with an excessive amount of computer generated communication requests. Imagine if a hacker is flooding your system it will eventually become overwhelmed with requests and those legitimate non-hacker requests will be delayed in reaching you. Worse - the legitimate requests may never get through and that means business lost for you.

The key with Denial of Services Detection is definitely prevention. Your goal as a business owner should be to prevent these highly damaging attacks. Recovering from an attack is not only costly, but it is time consuming. This means that your business may be off line until the problem is identified and eliminated. As a business owner you know that time is money and time spent off line will surely be detrimental to your business.

If you are interested in finding out more about Denial of Service prevention services please call us at 888.972.BLUE today. Our highly skilled technicians and friendly customer service representatives are standing by 24 hours a day 7 days a week. We look forward to working with you and your business.

Image Source: Salvatore Vuono / www.freedigitalphotos.net

First Published at Fastblue.com

About Casey Wedge

My name is Casey Wedge and I have been with Fastblue for a few years now. I have maintained a few different positions within the company and although I am currently the Regional Manager of Sales I am very fond of writing and like to stay up to date on whats going on in the world of Telecom.

Aside from work, I have played hockey my whole life so I am decent on the rink and a very average mountain biker. Breakfast foods are my favorite and I enjoy spending time with many fellow UCSB Gaucho Alums – Olé!

Distributed Denial of Service Protection

At Fastblue we are committed to not only providing our customers with the best communication services for their business, but also, we are dedicated to thoroughly explaining these often complicated services to our clients. This way we can work together to make the right choices to suit your unique needs. In this article we will discuss one of the external factor that can negatively affect your business efficiency and we will go on the discuss measures that you can take against this factor. The issues I am referring to are DDoS Attacks.

DDoS is a commonly used acronym for Distributed Denial of Services. This is a type of attack on your business’ network that can affect your website, webmail, and business critical applications – a few of your business’ major lifelines.

How does a DDoS attack work?

 

A hacker is at the root of the DDoS attack, however, rather than attacking your computer directly, the hacker ‘employs’ zombie computers to attack your system. This allows the hacker to create a much larger attack that is able to do a great deal of damage and it also allows the hacker to get away with the attack without getting caught. Basically, the hacker has a botnet of computers. These we will refer to as zombie computers. The hacker instructs these zombie computers to attack your specific site or server simultaneously and repeatedly. This overload of communication requests is what slows your website or email exchange. Have you ever tried to visit a webpage that was incredibly slow to load? Or perhaps the site never full developed? Or, have you ever sent an email with a relatively small attachment that stayed in your outbox and never made it through to the recipient? These issues could be the result of hackwork. And to make matters worse, since the attack is coming from a multitude of zombie computers it is incredibly difficult to track the origin of the attack and end it. This makes DDoS attacks very difficult to recover from. Imagine the damage that could be done to your company and your productivity with no website or email for hours or even days.

What can business owners do to fight against DDoS attacks?

 

As with many things, the best way to fight a DDoS attack is to prevent it. But, prevention is not just the one time act of putting in place firewalls and filters. These are effective tactics but they must be employed in combination with monitoring and there are several service providers that you can choose from. Here at Fastblue.com we work with a variety of DDoS Protection and Mitigation Service providers. This allows us to set each specific business up with the service provider that meets their unique needs at the best price. Please contact us today for more information.

Image Source: hyena reality / www.freedigitalphotos.net

First Published at Fastblue.com

About Casey Wedge
 
My name is Casey Wedge and I have been with Fastblue for a few years now. I have maintained a few different positions within the company and although I am currently the Regional Manager of Sales I am very fond of writing and like to stay up to date on whats going on in the world of Telecom.

Aside from work, I have played hockey my whole life so I am decent on the rink and a very average mountain biker. Breakfast foods are my favorite and I enjoy spending time with many fellow UCSB Gaucho Alums – Olé!

Denial of Service Detection

It is safe to say that we rely on our business websites for almost everything these days. Websites are the new phonebooks – potential customers are constantly navigating to our sites to quickly find our phone number and address so that they can reach out to our staff. Websites also take the place of customer service representatives. Customers use our websites to find out the specifics about the services or merchandise every company provides. Potential customers often use websites to compare prices, view menus and check business hours. This means that our sites are clearly great business assets, however, just like customer service representatives, our websites need to be reliable and available.

When websites go down, business owners not only face great headaches but can also incur great financial losses and decreased customer satisfaction. For this reason it is important to identify preventable and curable causes for these outages. Today we will be discussing a major cause of website errors – Denial of Service attacks.
Denial of Services attacks are attacks that hackers make on your system by bombarding your site with an excess of communication requests. These requests overload your network and clog up you communication pathways so that genuine non-hacker, normal business communication can’t get through. This means that when you or your customers try to use your site in an appropriate way an error message will pop up preventing you from accessing the site.

How do we fight against these Denial of Service Attacks? As with most things, it is best to prevent these attacks rather than recover from them once they happen. Detection and prevention is more cost effective and time efficient than recovery after an attack. All it takes is a bit of foresight to look into in a detection plan.

There are a variety of providers offering detection services that support businesses with Denial of Service detection solutions. These services set up firewalls that put in place rules that keep out known attackers. When requests come in from unusual and illegitimate IP addresses those requests are denied and dropped before they can affect your system. Unfortunately, firewalls do have limitations. For instance, if you are receiving an ongoing illegitimate attack on a port, it is often impossible and illogical to drop all of the traffic coming into that port because doing so would drop off all legitimate requests as well. Luckily, Denial of Services attack prevention providers have other tools to use in prevention. Switches and routers are employed for their ACL and their rate limiting abilities. Additional hardware can be installed on the network far in the front end to halt attacks before they even have the chance to reach the server.

Prevention is key. Please contact us at Fastblue.com to find out more about Distributed Denial of Service detection and prevention.

Click Here to Contact Us for DoS Detection Services

First Published at fastblue.com

Image Source: phanlop88 / Freedigitalphotos.net

About Casey Wedge

My name is Casey Wedge and I have been with Fastblue for a few years now. I have maintained a few different positions within the company and although I am currently the Regional Manager of Sales I am very fond of writing and like to stay up to date on whats going on in the world of Telecom.

Aside from work, I have played hockey my whole life so I am decent on the rink and a very average mountain biker. Breakfast foods are my favorite and I enjoy spending time with many fellow UCSB Gaucho Alums – Olé!