DDoS attack: what to understand about this attack and tips to protect yourself

A DDoS attack or denial of service attack is a cyber attack whose objective is to paralyse a server. Most often, organisations and companies are targeted by these attacks. By disabling the affected server, huge losses, including financial losses, can be incurred. Fortunately, there are ways to protect yourself and to contain this type of attack.

Definition of a DDoS attack

As mentioned above, a DDoS attack aims to make a server inaccessible in order to cause damage. In French, DDoS means: Attaque par déni de service distribuée (distributed denial of service attack) and you can protect yourself from this by opting for KoDDos protection. Indeed, the notion (distributed) that appears in the definition comes from the fact that the attack has several sources as origin. 

At the beginning of these types of attacks, we used to talk about DoS (Denial Of Service attack) and there was only one source, but this is no longer the case today. Different techniques are used nowadays to make a server inaccessible by denial of service. However, when the concept of DDoS is mentioned, it highlights the disabling of a server by its congestion. 

To be more explicit, the DDoS attack takes place when the information server is overloaded with requests to make it inoperable. The computer server is like a computer. And it stops working when it is asked to perform more tasks than it is capable of.

Tips to protect yourself from DDoS attacks

As you might expect, it is not impossible to protect yourself against a DDoS attack. The only way to do this is to have more consumption capacity than the size of the attack. Nowadays, several specialised companies offer such services. They make available huge bandwidths, thus producing a real armoury against DDoS attacks. 

It is then difficult to stop a DDoS attack in real time without using these means. The best way to protect yourself is to use preventive measures. Furthermore, it should be noted that such an attack is characterised by a high rate of network requests from a group of IP addresses. 

If these addresses send too many requests to the server, it would be advantageous to activate the blocking of IP addresses, especially when they are not authorised. You can do this in the server configuration or from the firewall.