With the recent DDOS attack on a country that’s in the Korean Peninsula, I was wondering how this actually happens and how it takes down the entire internet infrastructure?
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A DDoS attack is basically flooding networking equipment with traffic.
Think of it like someone arranging to make a massive traffic jam in front of your business. The street are blocked with traffic so legitimate customers can’t get in.
The source of this traffic is typically BotNets, thousands of machines that have been compromised by a hacker to act as source for garbage traffic. Combined they can generate multiple Gigabits of garbage traffic from multiple sources which makes it difficult to stop. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the largest Botnet on earth. Everything from your Grandmothers TV to your digital coffee pot are all connected to the internet these days and these devices often have little to no protection in front of them and are never updated with new software so they are easy targets for a hacker. So your PVR might be attacking Korea and you would have no idea.
Such a BotNet is actually available to rent, you can pay BitCoins to rent time on it. Script Kiddies that run MineCraft Servers are notorious for this because they make BitCoin by selling access to their MineCraft servers and then rent the BotNet to attack other peoples servers. Since they are usually children they don’t have the morals to understand what they are doing is wrong and HIGHLY illegal.
So how do you stop it?
Modern Firewalls have a degree of protection built in that identifies and blocks that traffic but most businesses rely on Services like CloudFlare. CloudFare is a service you put in front of your website to absorb these kinds of attacks. They have the technology and bandwidth to absorb and stop these kinds of attacks while only transmitting legitimate traffic to your servers.
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