In MMA, fighters find the Guillotine or Rear Naked Choke to be reliable tactics for eliciting a submission. In cyber warfare, a DDoS attack is the “go to” move that produces the ultimate cyber smackdown effectively, time after time.

Just like choke holds, Denial of Service attacks come in a variety of flavors – Flood Attacks, SYN Attacks, Smurf Attacks, Ping of Death Attacks, and the ultimate tap out producer Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (to name a few). Each method is designed to achieve a single goal – stifle the target website or online application.

Generally speaking, DoS/DDoS attacks accomplish this by directing a flood of “packets” (fake visitors, often robots) to your website at the same time. In simple terms, a denial of service attack takes up all your hosting environment’s available bandwidth and resources making it impossible for human traffic to reach your website or service.

DoS/DDoS Popularity and Severity on the Rise

Geared toward taking sites offline rather than stealing information or deceiving unknowing web surfers, DoS/DDoS attacks could be regarded as the cyber “crime of passion”. These attacks have effectively silenced religious and political groups from publicly publishing their opinions. High-profile organizations make headlines most often, but really any group with “offbeat” opinions could be the target of a DoS/DDoS onslaught.

Extortion is another popular motive behind DoS/DDoS attacks. Just recently, several Australian sports-betting websites lost millions in revenue over a busy weekend when criminals held their web services hostage for ransom money. Other commercial entities are starting to feel the effect of DoS/DDoS deployments too. Recruit Advantage and Bitbucket have both recently suffered losses due to prolonged outages, and it’s only a matter of time before mass-market retailers use attack-for-hire services to wreck holiday sales for the competition.

DoS/DDoS attacks can take a website or online service to it’s knees effectively and inexpensively, so they are growing to become a popular add on to botnet operators’ portfolios. For a mere $200/day, common Rent-a-DDoS operations can dish out botnet deployments ranging from 100Mbps to 100Gbps. Prolonged over several days, an attack of this magnitude could leave your start-up with a 5-digit invoice for bandwidth.

How to Prevent a DoS/DDoS Smackdown

Unlike other cyber crimes, this type of attack may not pose a direct threat to your clients’ PII (personally identifiable information). That doesn’t spare you the expense of lost sales, regaining public opinion, and technical resources however. In addition to those more “expected” costs, you’ll face charges for the bandwidth consumed during the exploit, and that bill alone could be enough to lead your startup business to early retirement.

The worst part is that if a cyber opponent has you in his or her sights, you’re going down for the count. There are no known prevention methods on record. DoS/DDoS attacks are like a jump spinning rear kick delivered in your blindspot. Scary, deadly stuff.

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