Unfortunately DDoS attacks are now common place and for those that don’t know, the term stands for a distributed denial of service which is an attack where a plethora of compromised systems attack one location for the purpose of crashing the target’s network so that users can no longer gain access. The massive amount of incoming messages basically overwhelms the system causing it to shutdown and all other regular users cannot access it either. This is why protection services such as ddos mitigation have become a necessary tool in the fight against such problems.

To explain further what happens in a DDoS attack, is a hacker finds a system that is easily exploited by different vulnerabilities and makes that system the DDoS master system. The hacker uses the master system to communicate with all the other systems that they plan to use in the DDoS attack.  The other systems are also easily compromised.  The hacker then uses cracking tools that are easily found on the Internet to load onto hundreds to thousands of hacked systems at one time. With the click of a button, the hacker can instruct all of the systems that are under the command of the DDoS master system to flood the targeted specified to be under attack. The amount of packets sent to the targeted machine causes the denial of service to pop up and the targeted system to shut down.

The media tends to focus on the targeted system of a DDoS attack as the victim, but the reality is that there are many victims associated with such as attack. The final target is a victim, but so are the systems that the hacker has infiltrated to use in the coordinated attack. The owners of these systems are usually unaware that anything has happened to their system even though it can cause malfunction and degradation in the service of the instrument. There is a lot more that is affected by denial of service than the ultimate target.  Recent denial of service attacks have affected such sites as Yahoo, GoDaddy, RIAA, Buy.com, and many more. These types of attacks are on the rise too. Gather more information about security and protection at ServerSpace.co.uk.

Denial of service attacks can affect more than just a website.  Governments have been affected also.  The country of Myanmar was the victim of a widespread disruption in October 2010, when a botnet took down the entire country of Myanmar in one afternoon. The group of computers that took the country offline are referred to as a botnet or sometimes called a zombie army. The master computer is called a bot or a zombie. Two major Internet security labs have identified botnets as the largest threat to our Internet security over worms, viruses, or spam.

The options that can be utilized to protect a computer against a DDoS attack are too technical for the common man to put into place. It is best to consult a computer professional to help you prevent a DDoS attack using ddos mitigation. You can however make sure that your security updates are current and that you immediately disable any unused or unwanted services.  These are practices that you should work on every day to make sure your computer is not falling prey to a DDoS attack.