By having a public facing website, it is almost impossible to avoid being a target for a Denial Of Service or a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDoS) attack.
What is a DOS or DDoS
A DOS or DDoS attack as you may well know, is an attempt by one or more users (typically "automated bots") to bring down a website or multiple websites on a server by sending many thousands of requests to that website/server in a very short space of time, thereby overwhelming or "crashing" the server.
When the server is continually and repeatedly hit up for resource requests from a single IP address, it's known as a Denial Of Service (or DOS) attack. It also happens when multiple IP devices do it and this is called a Distributed Denial Of Service or DDOS. A DOS and DDoS is usually many thousands of requests in a short space of time. This usually has a massive affect on the website / server's performance.
Basically, by repeatedly requesting the server resources (for example, by trying to load a website 5,000 times in a minute), the abusive machine(s) that are identified by either a single IP address, or multiple IP addresses, overwhelm the server. When the server becomes overwhelmed it can no longer manage to serve legitimate resource requests and 'locks up', 'freezes' or worse 'crashes' and shuts down.
Sometimes, these DOS or DDOS attacks can happen in error or can be as a result of a fault. However, in many cases, DOS and DDoS attacks are malicious with the protagonists' aim to crash the server to bring it offline (perhaps with the aim of seeking a 'ransom'). In some cases, the attack's purpose is to reduce the server's capability to defend itself - and whilst it's overwhelmed, it allows the attacker to gain access to otherwise secure data - or to be able to 'inject' hacking or malicious code.
Defence
We do monitor our servers and the traffic on them 24/7/365. We do our very best to smooth out any issues that may occur and we employ multiple strategies to protect our customer's sites.
Even the best defences can be inadequate however. You'll often read from various news sources - even the big players who have enormous budgets, still experience issues from time-to-time.
Indeed - while there are effective methods to help mitigate and stop these kinds of attacks, there is no single magic solution. Instead, it is a balancing act trying to prevent abusive traffic along with identifying and allowing legitimate traffic through the defences. Furthermore, it's a bit of a guessing game to determine what the attackers will do next.
What Can You Do?
Although DOS and DDoS is generally considered a malicious act, often servers and websites appear to be chosen in apparent random targets - so don't feel singled out!
With that said, if you are ever contacted by malicious persons, we advise extreme caution (feel free to be in touch if we can assist you).
Though not directly related to DOS / DDoS, there are always things you can do to help stay secure;
- Keep sites safe - ensure logins are strong and passwords are hard to guess
- NEVER use the same password on multiple sites - if one gets hacked, it leaves you exposed on all of the others
- Keep passwords safe e.g. use a Password Manager such as https://lastpass.com/ - also don't transmit passwords over email etc
If you sometimes experience a long load time, lag, or general latency, it can be a sign that our systems are busy working on a DOS or DDOS attack!
Where possible. we will provide a notice in our Network Status.