Motives for a DDoS attack
- Blackmail / extortion.
- Negatively affecting or even destroying your reputation.
- Unfair competition (exploiting your loss of service to gain your affected customers).
- A grudge against you or your business.
- The desire to gain credibility amongst the criminal fraternity.
- Hactivism.
Protecting your business
In technical terms, DDoS attacks can come in many forms, and like many aspects of the internet require in-depth knowledge to fully understand and guard against them.
If you have reason to believe that you are a potential target of a DDoS attack, we recommend that you locate and consult a DDoS protection specialist who is equipped with this knowledge and the accompanying tools to protect your business. He / she should be able to recommend and implement a technical solution to mitigate the threat to your business.
Capacity planning
Every organisation with a website should ensure that it is protected as much as possible against unusually high (and unanticipated) volumes of both unlawful and legitimate traffic.
You should conduct a risk assessment, considering all reasonable eventualities, and have in place the web server capacity, bandwidth and processing power to handle large concurrent volumes. Arrange with your hosting provider to facilitate flexible and proactive handling of short- or no-warning loads and consider load-balancing to multiple servers. These arrangements will come at a cost, but you will have to balance this against the risks and consequences to your business and may be able to negotiate.
