DDoS Attacks Explained: What They Are And How They Work

As the internet has become more accessible over the years, bad actors around the world have found it easier to use it to commit crimes and harass others. That's unfortunate — as much as the internet helps to bring us all together, connecting every computer in the world means connecting jerks to those of us who would rather not deal with them.

For about as long as the concept of malicious internet activity has been a thing, one of the most steadfast examples of said activity has been the DDoS attack. Whether for criminal purposes or just because someone called their fanfiction bad, hackers have used DDoS attacks to strangle websites and prevent others from accessing them, often utilizing malware in the process. It's still a widespread problem to this day, which is why it's up to you to arm yourself with knowledge in case your website ends up in a villain's crosshairs.

DDoS stands for distributed denial-of-service. The point of the attack is to inundate your website with traffic, to the point that it can't handle the influx of users and collapses under its own weight. In the simplest terms, a DDoS attack would be like if someone organized a parade across an entire stretch of highway with the express purpose of preventing you from driving to work. 

Theoretically speaking, it would be possible for a hacker to make this happen with real people, but they would need a lot of people connecting to your website simultaneously to make it happen. This is why, instead, hackers typically utilize botnets to perform DDoS attacks. A botnet is a network of computers that have been infected with some form of malware. At the hacker's command, every infected computer in the botnet attempts to connect to your website, often in multiple instances to maximize saturation.

There are variations of DDoS attacks such as HTTP floods, which overwhelm your site by rapidly refreshing, and protocol attacks, which specifically target network equipment and firewalls, but generally speaking, it's all about hitting you with as much malicious traffic as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, there are no surefire ways to prevent DDoS attacks. Hackers and bad actors are always refining their methods, so what staves them off today may not work tomorrow. That said, while there is no absolute shield, there are ways you can make life more difficult for malicious actors, as well as restore normalcy to your website faster.

The first thing you should do is set up DDoS protection for your website. You know those little "are you a human" checks you get when attempting to access some websites? That's DDoS protection, checking for those attempting to access the site in bulk from the same or similar IP addresses. If users (or bots) are detected, the protector stops them in their tracks with little puzzles that bots can't solve. Companies like Cloudflare offer these services to website owners.

You can also prepare some mitigation tactics in case the bots start pouring in. For instance, a web application firewall can be used to detect potentially malicious connections and steer them away, while rate limiting manually prevents a single IP address from connecting to the site more than once or twice.