Member Article

DDoS cyber attacks will rise

Technology provider the Stack Group has warned that cyber attacks known as DDoS are on the rise and will be a major threat for businesses in the future.

Only recently NatWest customers were blocked from accessing online accounts after hackers used distributed denial of service (DDoS) to bring down the banking system.

According to Jeff Orr, the Chief Executive of IT specialist the Stack Group these DDoS attacks are now a commercial operation, and can be purchased by internet users to bring down business websites and online operations.

Jeff said: “The recent crash of NatWest system is an example of how dangerous these DDoS attacks can be, and the worst thing is these are attacks are becoming commoditised. For users who know how, DDoS attacks can be hired to bring down websites and online services.”

A DDoS attack is where criminals use Trojans to infect PCs with non damaging Bots. These Bots do no harm to the PC itself but allow criminals to have a network of thousands or even millions of PCs, which can then be used to deliberately harm websites and online systems. The Bots instigate all the PCs to send traffic to a target, such as NatWest Online, bombard them with connection requests until the website can’t cope and crashes.

Jeff said: “DDoS attacks are extremely difficult to protect against, as company websites find it difficult to differentiate between malicious connections and genuine. Firewalls can be purchased which can help tear down malicious connections, but such firewalls are extremely expensive and can only mitigate the effect of DDoS attacks.”

Jeff warns that the rise of DDoS attacks is almost a forgone conclusion and SME’s in particular are at risk: “More and more individuals are becoming aware of how they can purchase DDoS cyber attacks for even just a few dollars and I can envisage a huge escalation in this type of attack, with disgruntled individuals attacking company’s online services.”

“For SME’s this is a particular risk because the software to guard against such attacks will be too expensive. Many SME’s websites are also built to only deal with relatively low levels of traffic hence their servers have limited buffer memory, this means that their websites can be brought down by far fewer simultaneous connections.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Dan Minchin .