Defending Against DDoS Attacks

A DDoS attack is an automated hostile activity by a hacker that inhibits users from accessing an online gift service.  DDoS attacks disrupt online services for an undetermined period, flood the company's servers with fake requests, and deny legitimate user requests, resulting in economic losses due to unavailable supplied services. A DDoS attack aims to target and degrade a single system (Dayal & Srivastava, 2021). DDoS is caused by various motives, including ideology (hitting sites with opposing viewpoints), business feuds (targeted competitors), forbearance, and cyber warfare such as (destabilizing another country's opposition websites).

One of the recent DDoS attacks is the one that happened in the Bitcoin.org, one of the first websites about Bitcoin. The website functions as a directory to find all the information required to start transacting in Bitcoin exchanges, wallets, merchants, forums, and events. It's an instructional website that explains how Bitcoin may help individuals, corporations, developers, and more. A DDoS attack on Bitcoin.com turned out to be a welcome surprise as this website is totally instructional and doesn’t gather or maintain any data about users or funds that would be of interest to the attackers (Sinclair, 2021). The attackers found it vulnerable to attack the website, make it unavailable and demand a ransom of 0.5 Bitcoin.

The massive DDoS attack on Bitcoin.com resulted in 30Gb of traffic per second, breaking the entire network infrastructure, including the website, API, and Web Socket API, as well as exchange charts. Some of the various ways that the organization would have prevented the DDoS attacks is by having Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Intrusion Protection Systems (IPS) systems in the network infrastructure (Mishra et al., 2020).  The organization should have ensured that all systems that are connected to the Internet have robust anti-virus and anti-spyware security. Now that the attack has already happened, the organization can employ other DDoS prevention technologies such as firewalls, VPNs, anti-spam, content filters, and load balancing to protect the network against DDoS attacks in the future.