Recently, major providers of internet and communication services have seen a major increase of Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS) that have crippled important services. This means that as more and more people become reliant on internet services due to the stay-at-home policies due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the impacts are much more meaningful. These impacts have now even caused DDoS attacks to be a source of “ransomware” opportunities for hackers. This article will help define what DDoS attacks are and explain how hackers can leverage old existing attack methods into new methods of holding critical services hostage until money or bitcoin can be paid to stop the attack. Prevention and protection methods will also be covered and how IT security professionals are trying to thwart these types of attacks.
There have been several attacks that have impacted many of us in our everyday lives, we just didn’t know that they were happening. In many of these cases it exposes the vulnerabilities of many of these network infrastructures, and businesses do not want that fact to be well known. It goes without saying that if a hacker knows something worked, they will continue to leverage that vulnerability in the future.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE BY VICTOR BARAJAS IN THE FALL 2020 EDITION OF GAMING & LEISURE MAGAZINE.