Hackers have different targets with their attacks. One of them, one of the most common, is to obtain financial benefit. They infect a system and subsequently earn revenue for it. For example, by stealing information and then selling it, by encrypting files and asking for a ransom in return, or by carrying out a DDoS attack and taking a server down. We are going to talk about the latter in this article. We will explain how they extort through DDoS attacks.
DDoS attacks on the rise to get money
DDoS attacks are intended to make a server is saturated and can not give an answer. It consists of sending a huge number of requests so that you do not have enough capacity. For example, this type of attack is capable of blocking a web page and leaving it without service for hours. This type of attack is also known as RDDoS.
Logically, this can lead to significant economic losses. Let’s think about a website where we can buy a series of products. If that page is down, if it cannot receive visits, that company will have economic losses at least for as long as they can’t sell something.
The same can be translated in any organization. A DDoS attack can make a business unable to continue operating. IT equipment can crash and they will not be able to offer service to customers, with what that means economically.
All of this is known to hackers and, in recent times, they have increased DDoS attacks to profit. They constantly look for a way to obtain economic benefit and they have seen that this method is very interesting to collect income by causing the interruption of the service of an online store or paralyzing a company.
December, a month with many attacks
According to the latest report from CloudflareDuring the last quarter of 2021, more or less 25% of its customers warned that they were the object of a DDoS attack. The attackers sent a ransom note to stop these attacks and for everything to function normally again.
But those attacks increased during the month of December. In fact, a third of customers reported these types of problems. This shows us that this is an ever-increasing problem. Cybercriminals have found a way to earn income here, and it replaces other common attacks.
What can we do to avoid these kinds of problems? Without a doubt it is essential to have the correctly updated systems. This will allow any vulnerability that arises to be corrected and thus prevent the entry of attackers. In addition, we must protect the network. Any security breach can be used by a cybercriminal to launch an RDDoS attack or any other similar one.
In addition, we must protect the systems. A good antivirus it can prevent the entry of security threats, such as downloading a fraudulent file or installing a program that is actually fake. This, together with common sense and avoiding making mistakes, is a very important protective barrier. It is important to recognize a DDoS attack early.
