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DDOS
The rising threat of DDoS Attack ahead of Black Friday & Cyber Monday
Beat DDoS Attack with sharp preparation ahead of Black Friday & Cyber Monday
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Beat DDoS Attack with sharp preparation ahead of Black Friday & Cyber Monday
Continue reading
Overview
DDoS Attack, the word spills a wave of intimidation for e-commerce organisations, especially when Thanksgiving is at the verge and all the insane deals like Black Friday & Cyber Mondayare set to hit on pretty much every e-comm stores.
So, it is a malicious endeavour to pull down any online service, temporarily blocking the useraccess, usually by sending an overwhelming request to its hosting server.
And, this time around the sales figure will exponentially thrive as much as 35% as per themarket predictions goes. It is leading to a burst into a whole host of blooming challenges foronline retailers.
But the same challenges are getting translated into reinforced cyber threats, primarily targetingthe saturation of these shopping seasons.
Although e-commerce infrastructure does remain paired up several online security gauges at anenterprise level throughout the years, this Thanksgiving shopping season can encounter theexceptional amount of abnormalities significantly when the traffic to e-commerce site surpassesthe standard threshold.
As scams like phishing claiming a gift card into content-scraping online bots accumulatingproduct and price data concerning folks posting counterfeit items are going to be inevitableespecially in this holiday shopping season, cyber-attacks on retailers have turned into anundesirable yearly convention to be on the lookout with this particular Black Friday.
Consequences of DDoS Attacks in Holiday Shopping Seasons:
BlackFriday & Cyber Monday.The overall sales volume over the various retail chain and local stores are substantiallyfluctuating in terms of the foot traffic since the past couple of months with no change in theprevailing consumer purchase.
According to the National Retail Federation, an overall growth between 3.5% and 4.1% duringthe retail sale of 2020 over 2019’s numbers is highly expected.And this will observe a seismic shift amidst the retail landscape leading to a showering of billiondollars of shoppers, especially those who use to get confined to spending at brick-and-mortarstores.
Distributed Denial-Of-Service Attacks usually target various shopping seasons with an elevatedproportion of attacks—however, DDoS attack adds-up to actually being the worst among all the other catastrophes of 2020. Additionally, their influence on Q1 & Q2 of 2020 was undoubtedlyevident in terms of its size, frequency and duration in comparison to last year withrecord-breaking bits-per-second (BPS) and packets-per-second (PTS) attacks.
Moreover, researchers at Kaspersky Labs are also associating this abrupt upswing withCOVID19 pandemic deriving staunch
“the forced migration of many day-to-day activities online led to an increase in potentialDDoS targets.”
DDoS attacks have never been easier or cheaper to execute, especially on a broad level giventhe increasing preponderance of precarious IoT devices effortlessly configured into botnets andinfectious approach to DDoS-as-a-service attack systems.
Types of DDoS Attacks targeting E-Commerce.
DDoS attacks can be categorised in various types. However, it can be broken down into threeforms, especially targeting e-commerce. Besides, attackers do have the option to articulate allthe three types into a single attack.
Volume-based DDoS Attacks:
If going with the name, volume-based DDoS attacks primarily concentrate on the volume ofinbound traffic. And the objective can be fulfilled through overloading the website’s bandwidth orresult in CPU or IOPS usage issues by employing botnets. This is another way to exhaust all ofthe bandwidth, making it difficult for real traffic to access the target as it is measured in bits persecond.
And the whole process becomes relatively simple as websites come with shared hostingconfiguration, and most of them are virtual private server (VPS).
Volume-based DDoS attacks can also be further broken down into subtypes.
UDP Flood:
The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) DoS attack will flood several ports randomly, running thehost server to report back with an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packet.
User Datagram Protocol flood is primarily exploited to generate error messages to the IPaddress when issues deterred IP packets delivery.
They work via packets, or Layer 3 / 4 attacks. And squeezes the webserver to respond,therefore grinding through the web server resources bringing it to either end or succumb.User Datagram Protocol is a connectionless protocol, meaning it doesn't support source IPaddresses.
It's because of UDP attacks are frequently associated with Distributed Reflective Denial ofService (DRDoS) attacks.
ICPM:
In this attack, the attacker spoof the server with overwhelming ICMP packets sent from amassive set of source IPs. The attack intends to exhaustion of server resources and failure toprocess requests, inflicting the server to reboot or lead to an extensive impact on its performance.
ICMP flood attacks can be targeted to servers or can be random. It almost consumes bandwidthto the point of exhaustion.
Ping Flood:
Similar to ICPM, this attack focuses on ping packets from a massive set of source IPs. Itoverwhelms the server until offline. And the challenging part lies where website owners can'tdetect the traffic generated from Ping Flood and the regular traffic comes to the website.
Protocol Attacks:
Protocol attacks send overwhelming malicious communication requests to servers and networkinfrastructures like firewalls & load balancers, depleting sufficient resources to disruptfunctioning.
Application Layer Attacks:
In the process of consuming additional disk space or memory from the overall web server bysending a spoofing request that seems legitimate leading to server down of the target.Since the per-minute costs of downtime are so high for e-commerce, they also have a stronginducement to contemplate paying the ransoms the offenders behind the DDoS attacks frequently require. DDoS attacks are also periodically utilised as an avocation strategy, whilethreat actors steal consumer payment card info from different parts of the victims' network.
How to Stop a DDoS Attack Targeting Retailers
The question may seem difficult to address if the target hasn't placed any online protectionagainst DDoS Attack. However, the practical solution against any DDoS attack is to be preparedwith a substantial defence mechanism beforehand, and this can be done through proactive planning.
Besides, cloud service providers or content delivery networks (CDN) generally providesone-stop DDoS protection services at the time of setting up your website. And the DDoSprotection services comprise of preventative load balancing and automatic traffic distributionfeature that sends traffic across a large-scale network of servers. Thus, mitigated the target fromgetting crashed by holding the traffic.
So, to curb the current situation, the thriving numbers of vendors do offer DDoS mitigationservices. And retailers also utilise these services for taking proper care of their back. But not allof them can do justice, so choosing a managed security service provider become tedious, at thesame time as saves time, efforts and wealth by thoroughly monitoring the latest vulnerabilitiesand threat across the system, and deploying the intelligent detection tools to filter out thelegitimate inbound traffic from a mixture of malicious one's
