Whether you are a casual game player on a Minecraft server or a company in the gaming industry, you’ve most likely heard about DDoS attacks. DDoS stands for “Distributed Denial-of-Service” and essentially refers to cyber crimes where the attacker prevents users of a server from connecting to online services. This is done by flooding the server with increased traffic, often carried out by hacker activists wanting to crash a company’s site. While it could be to make a statement, oftentimes it is an act done by a disgruntled user to exploit weakness and to prove a point.
The more severe cases of DDoS are financially motivated in order for one company to steal business from another. Ransomware is also a method used to essentially force the attacked company to pay a sum in order for the hacker to reverse the damage done to their server. No company is totally immune to DDoS attacks, regardless of size.
Amazon is perhaps one of the largest companies in the world, yet was still subject to one of the worst-ever recorded DDoS attacks in history in February 2020. According to The Verge, Amazon was able to mitigate the effects of the attack but were dealing with a traffic volume of 2.3 Tbps, the largest ever documented. When a company is a victim of these attacks, they damage its reputation, loose business, and see a serious decrease in traffic to the website following the event.
May confuse DoS attacks with DDoS attacks but the distinction is simply the size of the event. DoS attacks are done on a single internet connection to abuse security vulnerability through fake requests such as pop-up ads. DDoS attacks are much larger scale and are extremely hard to compete with due to the mass amounts of devices used to orchestrate the attack through botnets. A botnet refers to the connection these infected computers create during an attack.
Identifying if you are a victim of a DDoS attack can be difficult due to the symptoms reflecting normal technological issues. Performance speeds, slow download rates, no internet connection, and excessive spam are all warning signs that you might be experiencing one of these attacks. Give us a call today, and when working with our Minecraft server hosting services, be sure to ask what more you can do to protect and defend against DDoS attacks.
