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DDoS D
DoS attacks work by hackers taking control of a number of virus infected ‘zombie’ computers or ‘bots’, and using them to flood an organisation’s web servers with so much traffic that it
effectively renders the website, or in the case of the banks, online banking portal, inaccessible to anyone. The attacks are planned so that a huge amount of traffic hits the website or service at the same time. Anyone who has tried to purchase concert tickets online may have experienced something similar, as everyone rushes to the ticket outlet’s website at the time of sale. In a
-as-a-decoy attacks
- a growing threat for the global finance community By Eric Hemmendinger, Head of MSS Product Management, Tata Communications
Distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are becoming more commonplace, and have recently been hitting the headlines. Not only are they increasing in number, but advanced cyber criminals are now beginning to use these attacks as a diversionary tactic while they steal confidential data stored in other parts of the system. For financial institutions with so much sensitive information and people reliant on their services, the repercussions of this cybercrime are serious. Already this year, we have seen large financial organisations coming under threat from these malicious cyber attacks. In the US, five major institutions – Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp, PNC Financial Services Group, Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase – were all targeted by online criminal groups, attempting to disrupt the banks’ online services and potentially make fraudulent transfers from customers’ accounts. And, just last month in the UK, HSBC had its online services knocked offline due to a DDoS attack.
DDoS attack however, the website experiences a huge spike in traffic and crashes due to the servers not being able to handle the added strain on the service.
On high alert The recent high profile DDoS attacks on both private and public sector organisations have served to spur IT teams and business decision makers across all sectors to reassess the risks posed to them by DDoS attacks, and the provisions put in place to combat them. In many instances, financial service companies are able to
protect themselves against DDoS attacks by working closely with their network connectivity provider, who should have the scale and tools to help defend the company.
For a DDoS attack to be effective it needs to consume all the capacity of the web servers or applications it is targeting – and a by-product of this is legitimate traffic is squeezed out. DDoS mitigation and protection tools work by monitoring traffic flow and identifying spikes that are beyond the typical peaks that a site would normally experience, thus enabling early