DDoS Attacks: How Organizations Can Protect Against Takedown Attempts

Over the weekend, video game developer and publisher Blizzard Entertainment had a lot of angry gamers on its hands. The frustration stemmed from the fact the servers that usually would allow players to login to their accounts and play Blizzard titles online were inaccessible for hours. At cause of the disruption was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, in which a malicious actor floods a target with traffic in order to make a service unreachable and unusable for others. DDoS attacks have fallen out of the headlines in recent years but they shouldn't fall out of the purview of organizations trying to protect against potential threats. While data breaches have taken over in the minds of consumers as the top risk posed by hackers and other threat actors, DDoS attacks pose their own, considerable threat--especially as they become easier to carry out and require less resources than they once did to deliver a major punch to a targeted organization.