When it comes to DDoS protection, knowing your vulnerabilities is crucial since you understand what needs extra attention, resources, and protection. If you don’t critically assess the state of your business’s cybersecurity, its “weak spots” might be easily exploited. To avoid this risk, you should invest in DDoS protection, which can take the form of additional software or a protected server such as anti-DDoS VPS. There are categories of businesses that are more susceptible to DDoS attacks, and it’s important to know whether your business belongs to one of those categories and needs extra protection.
Industries that are at higher risk of DDoS attacks
In 2023, out of 23 billion cybersecurity attacks, more than 200 million were DDoS attacks, and the number, unfortunately, continues to grow. This type of attack gets more sophisticated thanks to AI technology that automates many processes, including the preparation to execute a cybersecurity threat.
Large businesses are obvious targets of DDoS attacks, and they make the most headlines. However, it doesn’t mean that smaller businesses aren’t at risk, and shouldn’t think about their DDoS protection.
It would be wrong to say that some industries and businesses are targets of DDoS attacks, while others aren’t: businesses of all types are at risk. However, research shows that some become targets more often than others. Considering that DDoS attacks are sometimes used as a distraction in the process of stealing sensitive information, the types of data that are most commonly stolen – governmental, financial, health, and other sensitive information – hint industries that fall victim to DDoS attacks more often. In this sense, financial and insurance, retail, healthcare, public administration, and education sectors become targets of cybersecurity attacks more often than others. Manufacturing businesses are also among the most targeted.
If we talk about DDoS attacks specifically e-commerce and retail businesses, fintech services, and the telecommunication sector are associated with the highest amount of instances of DDoS attacks. In the period between 2019 and 2020, statistically more than 2/3 of small and medium-sized e-commerce businesses had to deal with the consequences of security threats, including DDoS attacks.
The reasons and goals behind such types of attacks against businesses vary, but the most common ones are eliminating market competition, political agenda, including showing support or opposition to a specific philosophy, and, of course, financial gain.
Assessing the protection of your business from DDoS attacks
One great way to access the level of protection your business has against DDoS attacks is to undergo DDoS simulation testing, like the ones offered by AWS, Cloudflare, or Red Button. It can show you how resistant your system is to volumetric attacks, protocol attacks (usually involving different types of floods), and application-layer attacks. It evaluates how equipped your system is to withstand the DDoS attack of different types and volumes. Even though tests like these aren’t free, they allow you to get an accurate idea of the areas in your security that need improvement.
How to protect your business from DDoS attacks?
There are several ways you can approach laying a protective foundation against DDoS attacks.
Figure out your “weak spots”
Pay attention to services or elements of your system that are most exposed to the web — they would be the ones facing the attack head-on. Those can be easily accessible websites, corporate channels, services that support business infrastructure (i.e., DNS), or third-party services like cloud spaces.
Communicate to your service or hosting provider
You can ask your service or hosting provider if they offer an additional feature of DDoS protection. This option is great since DDoS protection from your provider will ensure its smooth integration with other components of your infrastructure.
Consider getting specialized DDoS protection
If your provider isn’t ready to offer your DDoS protection services, it doesn’t mean that you should give up the idea. You can get sufficient DDoS protection from other vendors to be sure that the vulnerabilities of your system won’t be exploited.
DDoS protection can:
- Monitor and filter out incoming traffic
- Identify and confirm a DDoS attack
- Analyze who’s attacking you
- Help activate the DDoS mitigation protocol
Now, with third-party vendors, you can get on-demand or permanent DDoS protection, each of which has its own advantages in specific situations. However, having either one of them is better than not being protected from DDoS attacks at all.
