DDoS protection: How to protect yourself against attacks

In this practical tip, we explain what a DDoS attack is and what the protection against such an attack can look like.

What is a DDoS attack?

DoS stands for "Denial of Service". DDoS means "Distributed Denial of Service".

• Whenever you access a web server, it reserves a certain amount of RAM.
• If many PCs access an (older) web server at the same time, it can happen that the RAM fills up and the server reports a "Denial of Service" because it can no longer handle all requests.
• This condition is provoked in a DDoS attack. So-called "botnets" are used here.
• A hacker uses his PC to control another (third-party) PC, which controls several command-and-control PCs.
• These command-and-control PCs in turn control the bot PCs on the Internet. The hacker can easily send countless requests to a web server remotely, so that it refuses to serve.

DDoS protection: How to protect yourself against attacks

It is difficult to protect yourself against a DDoS attack.

• If it is only a "simple" DoS attack, you can set up blocking lists against fixed IPs. However, due to the large number of IPs, this does not help much in a DDoS attack.
• One form of DDoS attack is the SYN flood. The connection establishment of the TCP transport protocol is used to make individual services or entire computers inaccessible from the network. So be sure to use SYN cookies.
• If you run a well-known website, it also makes sense to distribute the server load. This may seem a little expensive, but you can play it safe.

In the next practical tip, we will explain how hackers manage to hack a WLAN.