How to Safe Your Business from Cyber Attacks during Holidays

The Christmas and holiday season is an exciting time for many people as they get to relax, connect with friends and family, and celebrate traditions. Organizations also have much to rejoice about during the holidays (for example, more sales for retailers and more players for gaming companies). Unfortunately, cyber attackers also look forward to this time of year to celebrate an emerging holiday tradition—distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

 

Any website or server downtime during the peak holiday season can result in lost sales and customers, high recovery costs, or damage to your reputation. The impact is even more significant for smaller organizations as it is harder for them to recover from an attack.

 

With the holidays coming up, we’ve prepared this guide to provide you with an overview of DDoS attacks, trends we are seeing, and tips to help you protect against DDoS attacks and secure your website.

 

 

Why are DDoS attacks so common during the holidays?

 

Organizations typically have reduced resources dedicated to monitoring their networks and applications—providing easier opportunities for threat actors to execute an attack. Traffic volume is at an all-time high, especially for e-commerce websites and gaming providers, making it harder for IT staff to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate traffic. For attackers seeking financial gain, the opportunity for more lucrative payouts can be higher during the holidays as revenues are at the highest and service uptime is critical. Organizations are more willing to pay to stop an attack to minimize loss of sales, customer dissatisfaction, or damage to their reputation.

 

While retail and gaming companies are the most targeted during the holidays, organizations of all sizes and types are vulnerable to DDoS attacks. It’s easier than ever to conduct an attack. For only $500, anyone can pay for a DDoS subscription service to launch a DDoS attack. Every year, DDoS attacks are also becoming harder to protect against as new attack vectors emerge and cybercriminals leverage more advanced techniques, such as AI-based attacks.

 

In 2022 holiday season, you should be on alert. While DDoS attacks happen all year round, the seasonal holidays are one of the most popular times and where some of the most high-profile attacks occur. Last October in India, there was a 30-fold increase in DDoS attacks targeting services frequently used during the festive season, including media streaming, internet phone services, and online gaming. Last October through December 2021, Microsoft mitigated several large-scale DDoS attacks, including one of the largest attacks in history from approximately 10,000 sources spanning multiple countries.

 

 

Figure :

Number of DDoS Attacks and Durations Distribution (March 2021 - May 2022)

Source : Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2022

 

 

What is a DDos attack and how does it work?

 

A DDoS attack targets websites and servers by disrupting network services and attempts to overwhelm an application’s resources. Attackers will flood a site or server with large amounts of traffic, resulting in poor website functionality or knocking it offline altogether. DDoS attacks are carried out by individual devices (bots) or network of devices (botnet) that have been infected with malware and used to flood websites or services with high volumes of traffic. DDoS attacks can last a few hours, or even days.

 

There are a wide range of motives behind DDoS attacks, including financial, competitive advantage, or political. Attackers will hold a site’s functionality hostage demanding payment to stop the attacks and get sites and servers back online. We’re seeing a rise in cybercriminals combining DDoS attacks with other extortion attacks like ransomware (known as triple extortion ransomware) to extort more pressure and command higher payouts.  Also, cybercriminals will often use DDoS attacks as a distraction for more sophisticated targeted attacks, including malware insertion and data exfiltration.

 

Tips for protecting and responding against DDoS attacks in the 2022 holiday season

1. Don’t wait until after an attack to prepare. While you cannot completely avoid being a target of a DDoS attack, proactive planning and preparation can help you more effectively defend against an attack.
2. Make sure you’re protected. With DDoS attacks at an all-time high during the holidays, you need a DDoS protection service with advanced mitigation capabilities that can handle attacks at any scale.
3. Create a DDoS response strategy. Having a response strategy is critical to help you identify, mitigate, and quickly recover from DDoS attacks. A key part of the strategy is a DDoS response team with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. This DDoS response team should understand how to identify, mitigate, and monitor an attack and be able to coordinate with internal stakeholders and customers. We recommend using simulation testing to identify any gaps in your response strategy, including a website security check.
4. Reach out for help during an attack. If you think you are experiencing an attack, you should reach out to the appropriate technical professionals for help.
5. Learn and adapt after an attack. While you’ll likely want to move on as quickly as possible if you’ve experienced an attack, it’s important to continue to monitor your resources and conduct a retrospective after an attack. You should apply any learnings to improve your DDoS response strategy.

 

How Telin Can Help You

 

Telin Global Internet Security Service is designed to protect your network from cyberattacks on multiple levels. Backed by Telin’s extensive global resources and networks, our Internet Security services protect networks from cyberattacks on both the application and network layer with the additional support of multiple scrubbing centers, all at competitive pricing. Telin customers moreover enjoy portal monitoring services, low latency connection and 24/7 support.

 

If you’re interested in learning more about Telin’s offers, just send us an email at marketing@telin.net and we can chat about how best to move your business forward. Don’t let DDoS attacks ruin your holidays! Take steps to set up your DDos attack prevention today. Stay safe, stay healthy, and Stay Connected with Telin!