Linuxaria

Guest post by Sophie Davidson

Modern day criminals are no longer entering banks with ski masks and pistols. Today’s felons are moving into cyberspace to accomplish their nefarious goals.

Remember the old adage, “a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime”? It turns out this maxim holds a lot of weight with regards to DDoS cybercrime.

Double DDoS

Recent research from BT revealed that about 41% of online businesses surveyed were victims of DDoS in the last 12 months. The more notable findings of the research showed that, of those attacked, over 78 percent were subsequently hit a second time shortly thereafter.

Distributed Denial of Service attacks or DDoS encompass a large variety of cyber threats designed to overwhelm a target’s server, or jam up their network. By disrupting a target’s resources, the hackers succeed in preventing normal traffic (such as users or customers) from passing through.

The effects of these attacks are potentially devastating. After being hit by a strong attack, it takes on average at least 12 hours to offer full service back to users.

What can happen in 12 hours? This sort of disruption could mean losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. Or, perhaps worse, the trust between the user and the online business, built up over months or years, could be lost in a matter of minutes.
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