Hotels and airlines rely on a wide array of networks to provide reservation, payment, entertainment, and security systems. If a cyber-criminal can disrupt a company network by way of a DDoS attack, they can shut the entire operation down until they receive payment to put the system back up again. For large hotels and airlines, the loss of revenue that could result from operations being down for even a couple of hours makes paying a large price potentially worth it. For small and medium sized companies failure to pay the ransom could mark the end of the business altogether.
As covered in Cyber Insurance for small businesses – understanding the pitfalls in an ever changing world (ecrcentre.co.uk) – the insurance to cover the cost of these types of attacks is becoming more and more expensive and limited in scope. It pays to have other options if you are unlucky enough to face this type of incident.
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, website, or network by overwhelming it with a flood of Internet traffic.
DDoS attacks frequently come from multiple sources to make their identification more difficult. It can also hinder the victim organization’s attempts to stop the DDoS.
In lay terms it’s like an unexpected traffic jam clogging up the highway, preventing regular traffic from arriving at its destination.
DDoS normally present themselves, as you would expect, by a slowing or crashing of a company’s network or website. Which costs you time, reputation and money and potentially drives your customers to competitors websites
DDoS attacks are notoriously difficult to prevent.
The attackers don’t need internal access to the network as the attack is from the outside. They are increasing in complexity and sophistication meaning that defence against these dark arts needs continual review. But the key points for protection to remember are
The impact of a successful attack against your website or network can be catastrophic and lead to website downtime, loss of business and loss of reputation. In the worst cases it can lead to the closure of the business altogether. But all is not lost.
Here at the centre, we would advise you to do three things now
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