Protecting Your Business from Internet Attack
Internet attacks happen more often then you may think. Let me illustrate my point: You get a call from an affiliate or publisher notifying you that your tracking or website appears to be down. You immediately contact your service provider who tells you that you have exceeded your bandwidth and that your site is inaccessible because their servers can’t handle that level of traffic. You are issued a warning to stop who ever is pounding their system with traffic but you don’t know who is doing it. What can you do? Almost nothing… You’re out of business until either the attack stops or you get setup with a new IP address and account from your service provider(s), which can take days or weeks, if they even allow you back at all. Your future is bleak, you’re upset and you have absolutely no recourse. On top of all that, your service provider sends you a bill for the bandwidth overage demanding tens of thousands of dollars.
You are the unfortunate recipient of a denial of service (DoS) attack. Although the means, motives and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally comprises the concerted, malevolent efforts of a person or persons to prevent an internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. These include targeted attacks that take advantage of infrastructure vulnerabilities, such as limited bandwidth; consumption attacks that employ botnets to direct large amounts of traffic at a network, and resource exhaustive attacks that utilize the full processing power of a corporate server farm. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) is one of these resource exhaustive attacks because instead of a single source providing the attack, it is initiated from thousands or millions of compromised consumer computers. It’s like standing on the pitchers mount while every person in the stadium throws baseballs at you all at once and you have to return each ball to the person who threw it. Your server(s) get so busy that they simply can not respond to legitimate traffic anymore.
What can I do to protect myself before I am attacked?
There are only two ways to protect yourself, spend millions of dollars building your own technology infrastructure to handle an attacks load on your system or outsource protection. Some reputable companies like Prolexic Technologies (www.prolexic.com) can integrate with your tracking platform or website. Prolexic is a leader in Denial-of-Service protection. In the event of an attack, they can detect it and automatically switch all traffic through their own systems first. Their robust systems are spread out all over the world and can handle even the largest attack by filtering out the malevolent traffic and allowing legitimate traffic to reach your tracking system or site. This protection is not cheap if you go direct to these protection assurance companies. However, check with your tracking platform provider to see if they have integrated with one first. They may be able to offer it at a discounted rate.
According to Bryan Call, Vice President of Technology for Burstabit Media, “When an attack comes from a single source it is relatively easy to stop it, but when it comes from thousands of compromised computers around the world, as is the case with a DDoS attack it becomes very difficult to handle. You must have enough bandwidth to allow all the requests to first hit the border of your network. Then you must be able to distinguish which requests to allow into your network and which need to be blocked. This is where a company like Prolexic offers a great solution. With their global presence they are able to stop illegitimate requests closer to the attack’s country of origin and long before it gets close to the border of your network. Then your bandwidth isn’t affected and your servers aren’t kept busy with invalid requests while the valid profitable ones have to wait or are ignored entirely.”
What happens if I don’t have Denial-of-Service Protection?
- Your tracking, marketing materials and website will not be available for an indefinite period of time.
- Loss in business revenue during an attack.
- Upset affiliates and merchants because their tracking and links are affected.
- Bandwidth utilized during a single attack can accrue tens of thousands of dollars in fees to you.
- Expensive reactivation fees can be assessed to bring your tracking and website back online.
- You may be labeled “High Risk” to other hosting and tracking platforms.
Who is doing something about Denial-of-Service attacks in the online advertising industry?
It is unclear which tracking and hosting platforms have taken steps to protect your business. After speaking with Prolexic, they related to me that only one online tracking provider has taken steps to integrate with their services. Burstabit Media integrated the LinkTrust (www.linktrust.com) platform with Prolexic so as to provide full internet attack protection to each of their clients upon request.
“Our customers are online marketers, ad networks and merchants who rely on available and secure web services to ensure profitability,” said Frank Ouimette, President of Burstabit Media, Inc. (www.burstabit.com). “We want to give our customers the absolute assurance we are doing everything possible to ensure their business processes are unimpeded. That is why we are augmenting our DDoS protection through Prolexic, who has achieved the market leading position in DDoS attack mitigation.”
If you haven’t started thinking about protecting your company and securing your assets from attack, what are you waiting for?
