You’ve undoubtedly heard a lot about DDoS attacks and hopefully stayed fortunate enough never to experience one.  

If so, consider yourself lucky. 

The acronym DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service. In the case of DDoS multiple compromised systems (bots) attack one target. This large army of bots (called a botnet) typically chooses internet services to attack, overwhelming them with requests and unavailable for a typical transaction.

Once a DDoS attack targets you, it’s able to shut down your network. While most DDoS attacks are against websites, DDoS attacks may occur against any network resource exposed to the outside world, preventing your employees, customers, and prospects from using the network resource. It’s simple if the number of requests being made is too overwhelming for your existing allocated connectivity resources. There are only a few options other than to wait until it’s over.

Statistics show that around 50 million DDoS attacks occur every year, which should wake you up to what could potentially happen.

What’s worse is these attacks are becoming overly complex and could strike different parts of your network system. They often get used as diversions for various illegal online activities as well.

Here’s everything you need to know about DDoS attacks and the damage they are capable of inflicting.

See also: Developing Your Abuse Handling Solution: Build Or Buy?

The Costs Involved in a DDoS Attack

Kaspersky notes the cost of a DDoS attack on a small business is already at a staggering $52,000. For an enterprise, the costs can go all the way up to $444,000.

All of these expenses relate to emergency mitigation, lost productivity, and lost customers. However, the most significant consequence is losing access to critical data, especially when it needs to adhere to government regulations.

Another consequence of bringing outstanding financial liabilities includes a damaged business reputation. When customers see you didn’t bother to protect yourself against such a brazen attack, it makes you look careless. Most notably, it’s true when customers depend on you for their safety through their internet service provider.

Expenses in Repairing Damage

After a severe DDoS attack goes away, you will have to spend a not neglectable amount of time getting your systems up and running again. You check if everything is still working correctly or if the high load may have caused some unforeseeable problems.

Another time-consuming action item is to check if this attack could have been avoided or at least mitigated and find ways to prevent a similar attack next time. You might end up changing services or spending lots of resources and money on new appliances and security products.

The problem is, most of the thieves who create DDoS Trojans seldom get caught. However, some do, and the arrest of a 16-year-old boy in the U.K. three years ago weeded out one of the worst DDoS attacks in history.

Being Caught Off Guard

A DDoS attack could bring other problems costing you even more than the expenses listed above as an official disaster. Not being prepared will likely cause your business to cease operations during the duration of the attack. Think about it, how long can my business survive without new business? Can you cover your expenses for the days and weeks after an attack episode? Often companies that have had persistent DDoS attacks won’t fully resume their original pace of business immediately.

Also, many of your existing IT staff may not have the means to deal with a DDoS attack when you don’t take the risk seriously. IT experts continually note firewalls and other intrusion prevention systems don’t always have the ways to protect you comprehensively.

See also: Network Providers: How Abuse Handling Fits Into Your Security Concept

Having this in mind, what can you do to give you the best protection against these ever-increasing threats?

As a Service Provider: keep your own house clean

Over the last few years, the sizes and amounts of DDoS attacks have constantly increased. Unfortunately, available bandwidth has not been able to keep up with the attacker’s botnet resources, resulting in the situation. If a DDoS attack is overwhelming, the only recourse might be to wait it out, and hope for the best.

The logical way to tackle an attack and get your network operations back under control is to remove the criminals’ botnet resources.  First, any attacking machines within your network should be wall gardened or shut down immediately, and the subscribers notified.  Next, identify attacking bots and inform the network operator hosting the IP addresses about the attack, requesting them to wall garden or shut down the abusing IP address quickly.

If you are a service provider, your central role is to protect customers from spam and potential cyber-attacks and ensure that you care for customers within your compromised environment. With AbuseHQ, Abusix provides a new standard that helps combat network abuse.

At the core of this is a dedicated team watching out for you and giving you the tools necessary to take care of problems on your own efficiently.

Contact us to find out more about how AbuseHQ works to fight today’s most concerning cyber issues.