Denial of service is a strategy that is used by typical hackers and online criminals to reduce the ability of an online business to provide services to genuine customers and is used to reduce the profits that are made by the business. The denial of service causes the servers that are in place to handle the needs and requests from the customers to start responding only to the servers that belong to the hackers while the genuine customers are not assigned any servers to deal with them.
As such, the attention of the servers is focused on the attacker’s servers while genuine clients do not receive any services. The hackers make use of many computers to overwhelm a genuine online server with too many requests and thus cause it to stop handling or even responding to any requests. The users of the systems will find that their resources are being overwhelmed by too many requests and this means that it will consequently stop performing.
The servers might even be forced to shut down owing to the denial of service attack and this means that the online entity such as an eCommerce business will stop functioning for a while and the customers will not be even pleased about this. By focusing on preventing or reducing the effect of the denial of service attacks, a server can recover the onslaught much faster and keep providing service to the genuine customers of the services or business.
This includes filtering the traffic that is directed at the servers and blocking out the IP addresses that seem to be sending the DOS traffic. This might seem a little complicated for starters but to be honest, it can be done using firewalls that are known to recognize the traffic that is not useful for the servers and which is keen on causing damage to the servers and making them not to render service to the legal clients.
Distributed denial of service attacks are more intense than the normal DOS attacks and make use of more computers that are slaved to cause the denial of service and the IP addresses used in this scenario are always random and totally unpredictable. The server can pass on its services to a backup system when it feels like it is currently being overwhelmed by the requests for services and this will make it possible to provide continuous services to the clients even when one of the servers is down.
Such a distributed system makes it easier to recover faster from failure and ensures that the clients receive the services they are looking for even when the systems are currently under attack. Additionally, the information system should be well secured to ensure that the hackers do not attack it for too long before a recovery strategy getting affected. The users of the system and the administrators are all to suffer in the event of service disruption which is reason enough to put in place measures to take on the damage caused by these denials of service attacks.
