Partner Article

Disaster Strikes - Could You Handle a Cyber Attack?

Discover how well you can handle a cyber attack and how you can improve your disaster management.

Until recently there were two strands to IT security; keeping malware off of your Linux systems and preventing unauthorised access to your data. Both are obviously still vital and there are well established methodologies for dealing with them, but a third threat has become more prominent - Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on web servers.

Denial of Service attacks have been happening for 10 years, but the spread of ‘botnets’ and simple tools for controlling them have made massive DDoS attacks much easier to initiate and much more common.

DDoS attacks arrive suddenly - if they are not dealt with instantly your website will slow to a crawl in seconds and may become totally unavailable. You need a strategy in place, software, hardware and people who know how to handle the situation, even if it happens in the early hours of the morning on a public holiday.

Best Practice DDoS Mitigation Strategy

1. Monitoring.

You need continuous monitoring of activity on your web servers that can detect unusual activity before it becomes overwhelming.

2. People.

You need people who have been trained in how to respond appropriately and who have the authority to make the right decisions quickly. No headless chickens!

3. Procedures.

There isn’t time to think through your response, you need a procedure that will kick in immediately. Some of it can be automated.

4. Infrastructure.

You might use dedicated hardware and reporting software in-house, rely completely on public Cloud systems, or employ some hybrid of the two, but your real/virtual infrastructure needs mitigation built-in.

5. Business Continuity.

Even the best mitigation will be noticeable to some users. You must repair, reassure, reconnect and regain customer confidence. Pretending it didn’t happen isn’t smart.

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This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Simon Mitchell .