Get to Know About How to Block DoS Attacks
A denial of service attack (DOS) is a very common type of cyber attack that aims at disrupting a network and denies access to users. It is done by overloading the victim network with an overload of requests and prevents legitimate requests from being fulfilled.
How to Block DoS Attacks?
A DoS attack targets vulnerable systems, servers, routers, etc. that have a low level of security. It is vital to know how to prevent a DoS attack if you want your system and data safe from hackers and cybercriminals. Read the following guide to understand all about a DoS attack and its prevention.
Common Types of DoS attacks
If you want to protect your system or network from crashing or behaving strangely, it is vital that you stay informed about various types of DoS attacks and can identify them. Let’s know about the most common ones:
- Ping Flooding: Cyber attackers use the ping command to send an overload of ping packets to the target network. It is easy to initiate, and when the traffic reaches a level more than the network’s bandwidth capacity, the network crashes or goes down.
- Application-level floods: The most common DoS attacks are based on bandwidth attacks, but some criminals explore software issues such as buffer overflows. Such an attack disrupts an application and fills up all the space in available memory or the CPU.
- Peer-to-Peer attacks: In this cyber attack, users are made to disconnect from peer-to-peer networks and get connected to the attacked website. Thousands of users may try to join the victim’s website simultaneously.
If the attackers use sufficient computers, then the overflow of requests can crash a website easily. It does not involve a botnet and can be launched without any communication with the computers used to make the attack.
Steps for How to Prevent DoS Attacks on Websites?
Denial of Service Attacks Prevention and Mitigation:
DoS attacks are getting very frequent recently, and they target popular websites and businesses. Sometimes it gets challenging to detect a DoS attack and stop it, but it’s not impossible. Get familiar with DoS attack prevention and detection to keep yourself safe from cybercriminals. These steps will help you stay secure:
1. Contact your Internet Service provider
When a website faces a DoS attack, it usually scrambles to stop the attack but fails to do so. A good measure is to contact your internet service provider and ask for assistance. The ISP can null route your website.
By this, your ISP will send all traffic directed to your website to trash. It will also stop real users from visiting your website for some time, but overall it is a great way to tackle DoS attacks
2. Get professional help to detect DoS attacks
Many companies offer technologies to help against DoS attacks. They can detect if the traffic is legal or there is a DoS attack being made. Cloud mitigation providers have vast amounts of network bandwidth.
Even if you have multiple ISPs or cloud providers, they will filter the traffic for you and send only clean traffic to your website.
3. Use of SYN cookies
You can make use of SYN cookies in your server for better network safety and efficiency. It is a great way to fight SYN floods because they track incoming TCP connections and reduce the chances of an SYN flood overloading the network and cause it to crash because of it.
4. Configure your router and firewall
It is one of the simpler methods in which a coder writes a Python script to block fake traffic or make use of an existing firewall for traffic blocking.
Your router is the gateway to your network. You need to make sure that your router and firewall are updated with the latest security features so that your system is not vulnerable to attacks made by hackers.
5. Use reliable security software
The use of reliable security software and DoS attack tools can help analyze data packets before they reach your network. They can classify data as regular or dangerous and can block any data that may cause damage to your website.
Also, security software like McAfee is there which can provide much-needed security to your devices. You should also protect your personal devices with strong passwords so that no one can access them.
Conclusion
Recently, thousands of DoS attacks are taking place every day, and it is crucial to make sure you are well protected against such attacks. The above guide tells about how to prevent a DoS attack. Follow these steps to ensure that your network and websites are safe, and you do not suffer any losses because of a DoS attack.
