A SOLUTION AGAINST DDOS ATTACKS
A growing threat for companies
If you asked someone a few years ago about his/her opinion on DDoS attacks, very likely, the average person wouldn’t have anything to say. However, as our digital society keeps growing rapidly, so does the threat of DDoS attacks and their popularity. These distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks disrupt networks, service, services, and servers by simply using enormous amounts of internet traffic. The server cannot handle that amount of information and, thus, crashes, which can potentially lead to dramatic consequences.
During the pandemic, people and businesses have been forced to spend most of their time in the digital environment. The result has been an 87% increase in the number of remote workers in the United States according to Upwork. This increase has led to a much larger attack surface which increases the number of DDoS attacks.
Damage caused by DDoS attacks
Imagine owning a large webshop. Your company is completely dependent on the digital environment and you are making great daily revenues. After a great Black Friday campaign, you find out that your website has been DDoSed and can´t be accessed anymore for the coming 10–20 hours. This would result in an enormous loss of potential revenues and, thereby, cause serious financial troubles.
According to the 2017 study, carried out by Kaspersky, the average cost of a DDoS attack for SMEs is around 120,000 USD. However, this amount can climb up to 2,000,000 USD for corporations. Next to that, because of the remarkably increased attack surface, we can assume that DDoS attacks will get more sophisticated and their frequency will increase. In addition, the numbers mentioned above are related to the pre-pandemic period. Not to mention, that apart from direct financial losses caused by the attack, a lot of DDoS attacks are followed up by extortion and ransom which would further increase the associated costs.
A rise in the number of DDoS attacks
According to ATLAS Security, the number of DDoS attacks in 2020 totalled 10 million and, thereby, increased by 1.6 million compared to 2019. Although an increase in the number of DDoS attacks is a normal process, the high rate of this growth indicates that cyber-criminals have exploited the above-mentioned surge in remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Moreover, the analysis found that the attack frequency was 20% higher in 2020. Looking at the other article written by SecurityWeek, this means that the Internet has to deal with an average of 28,700 distinct attacks every day. This number is around 1,000 times greater than the previously made estimates. This of course is quite troublesome.
How to protect your company from DDoS attacks
There are a couple of measures a company can take to protect itself from potential DDoS attacks.
- Companies can, of course, decide to invest money to increase their bandwidth so that to potentially become more resistant to smaller DDoS and DoS attacks. However, with the gravity and scale of modern DDoS attacks, a huge investment in bandwidth is required to be able to absorb the monstrous amounts of internet traffic.
- Another option is to invest money in services that will use a 3rd party server to control and guide all the internet traffic coming to your website. For example, when using Cloudflare, your origin IP address will be masked for proxied DNS records. In addition, all proxied traffic will be analyzed by Cloudflare and, thus, DDoS attacks will be repelled effectively. However, to enjoy the full benefits of complete protection, you need to spend a lot of money. Therefore, this option might not be a realistic solution for SMEs.
- Due to a lack of affordable solutions against DDoS attacks, the DisBalancer team has decided to invent a new decentralized system that allows website navigators to deploy their own nodes. This means that the server will be forwarded and run by a large number of nodes that can be deployed by every owner of a personal computer who lends out its bandwidth. In other words, power is kept, distributed, and given by the community to the community.
A DDoS attack will therefore fail to overload the website. This decentralized system called DisBalancer will allow the network to have enough capacity to handle many gigabytes of connections per second so that customers’ resources will run smoothly. An innovative, effective, and yet straightforward solution to create a DDoS-resistant digital environment.
Please visit disBalancer media channels to find more info about the project and its utility token.
