DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) Attacks: All You Need to Know!

We live in an era where the internet consumes a massive part of our lives. The influence doesn’t stop with our personal lives. If we analyze the latest market trends, the internet has radically transformed the face of our professional trajectories too. An increasing number of businesses migrate website to WordPress every day, and this trend of digitalization does not seem to stop any sooner.

It is a significant fact that the internet has not just transformed but also enhanced the reach of small businesses. Marketing and Business-to-customer relations are the primary aspects at the receiving end of this change. At the same time, it won’t be fair to overlook the new issues which have emerged along with this wave. Security breaches and infringement are the most prevalent of all these problems.

In 2016, some of the major online players like Amazon, Netflix, etc. suffered from an aggressive attack of DDoS. Services like transactions, streaming, and customer interactions suffered a massive attack. This caused a lot of inconvenience and delays.

To the merit of their technical teams, it was easy for them to recover from these breaches without incurring any significant losses.
The same can’t be reassured for the smaller businesses, especially the ones operating from WordPress. According to WordPress experts, due to the considerable flexibility of the platform, it is way more vulnerable to DDoS attacks to any other service.

To deal with this, we need to develop a very comprehensive understanding of such attacks and the associated problems.

First things first: what’s DDoS?

DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Service attack. Hackers attack the vulnerable devices involved in a network to request or send data to the server. One of the most prominent and immediate impacts of this attack is a slump in the speed of the net. This causes significant delays and inconveniences to the customers. Moreover, the fishy access of the server information to unethical organizations also poses a threat of identity theft to the server clients. These cyber-attacks are usually lodged to exercise control over high traffic servers and then hold them illegitimately to demand a Ransom from the admins.

What makes your website vulnerable?

If you own a WordPress-hosted website, then your server may prove to be quite vulnerable to such security breaches. WordPress welcomes various third party plugins on its websites, and hence, the services end up exposed to unethical organizations. If you have such plugins enabled on your site, then there is a high chance of your web portal running into a case of DDoS and other cyber attacks.

How to put up a stronger defense?

You must keep an eye on your website’s activity log to detect any suspicious activities before any significant harm. One of the most significant issues associated with the DDoS attacks is the effortless masking. Since the attacks are spread across various devices on the network, it is difficult to spot the invasion in the early stages. That being said, it is necessary to adopt some additional practices to defend yourself against the same. Here are some steps which must be taken to prevent DDoS attacks:

Disabling XML-RPC and REST-API

These features grant access to their party plugins and services. If you spit any suspicious activities, make sure you disable these permissions before proceeding further.

Activating WAF

The website application firewall (WAF) detects and blocks any suspicious activities before they get access to the critical information of the network.

Enabling additional security plugins

The market is well equipped with special security plugins that work similarly to the WAF and block any malicious additions to the network.

Blocking suspicious third party services.

As a preventive measure, keep on spectating the activity log of third party services on your website and block them in due time if you spit anything malicious.

The steps to be taken once your service runs into it?

In spite of adopting all such preventive measures, it is inevitable to stay safe from such attacks. Hence, it is necessary to be well versed with the steps that must be taken once you run into such an attack:

Let the team members and clients know

Since the team members and the clients are the ones to be profoundly affected by these attacks, they must be informed in due time do that they retrieve and withdraw any critical information from their systems.

Contact your hosting service

To recover from the attack and the subsequent losses, it is essential to inform and take help from your hosting services.

Whenever you choose to migrate the website to WordPress, make sure that you get yourself acquainted with all the perils associated with the flexibility. Security is a pivotal aspect of any growing online business. Any infringement may end up costing you significant business and clients. So, make sure you keep a proper check at your defense against such attacks.