5 Best Practices for Mitigating DDoS Attacks

For organisations, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one of the dangerous obstacles they’ll face. While a DDoS attack takes different forms, the goal of the attacks is to typically incapacitate targeted servers or networks by flooding them with traffic from compromised devices or networks. Not only do these attacks cause services to be severely interrupted, but there is a significant cost to organisations. The average DDoS attack costs enterprise businesses around $2m and costs small and medium-sized businesses around $120,000.

Often, attackers employ DDoS attacks to extort businesses in a similar way to ransomware attacks. Indeed, DDoS has paired with ransomware for a long time. Here, cyber-criminals flood a victim’s servers and networks with requests, crippling their operations and then demanding money to end the foray. A survey carried out this year of 313 cybersecurity professionals by the Neustar International Security Council (NISC) found that nearly half (44%) of organisations have been targeted or fallen victim to a ransom-related distributed denial of service (RDDoS) attack in the past 12 months.

Given the danger posed by DDoS attacks, especially ransom-related DDoS attacks, security teams often find themselves in a st