How to Prevent DDoS Attacks: A Course for Beginners!

Bypassing web security systems and other traps might be a sport for hackers or something they do for a living. DDoS attacks are one of the disrupting bombs that programmers with malicious intents can drop on businesses. So, how to prevent DDoS attacks and guarantee that your website fights off enormous amounts of fake traffic? This DDoS attacking tutorial opts to provide some strategies for prevention and mitigation. 

This DDoS tutorial is beginner-friendly: anyone is welcome to become my student! In one of my lectures, I explain all the necessary terms. Make sure to check that out! Do not hesitate to learn how to prevent DDoS attacks before your website loses momentum or experiences financial losses!

Some unsettling statistics 

According to TrendMicro (who went undercover in the black market), it was revealed that with only $150, one could hire hackers to conduct DDoS attacks for a whole week. Let's say your business is growing steadily, achieving more than ever in sales and publicity. Then, competitors or other third-parties decide to launch a DDoS attack against you, leaving your main website unavailable, making your sales drop, etc. 

Is that enough to make you want to learn how to prevent DDoS attacks? In case you are still debating, remember that more than 2000 attacks happen every day. Additionally, 1 out of 3 cases of websites being down, a DDoS attack is the culprit. With these statistics in mind, let’s continue. 

DDoS attacks and fake traffic

Before embarking on a journey to learn how to prevent DDoS attacks, you should know more about them. In general, there are several components of these malicious acts: 

• DDoS aims to infect servers or networks with the sole purpose of making them unstable and unable to perform their routine tasks. 
• Website owners will tell you that traffic is a blessing. However, they are a curse when it comes to DDoS attacks. 
• The main idea of DDoS acts is that hackers generate a constant flood of traffic that prevents websites from functioning. For instance, an infected system might receive repetitive requests. 
• The DDoS attack is different than DoS: while the DoS attack comes from a single source, DDoS attacks websites from multiple sources (botnet). 
• Networks or servers are usually capable of handling DoS attacks, but DDoS are strong enough to overwhelm them. As a result, legitimate traffic won’t be able to reach your website. 
• How to protect against DDoS attacks? From the basic perspective, prepare an action plan for when such an attack occurs, install protection tools (firewalls, network monitoring software, anti-virus programs, etc.) and update your systems. 

What will you find in this DDoS tutorial?

In this course on how to protect against DDoS attacks, I will be starting from the physical protection for servers. If you are managing your own server, you will have no choice but to take care of UPS, physical accesses, and monitoring manually. 

However, it is recommended to choose a cloud or another server-provider that will manage all these features. In another section of this DDoS attacking tutorial, I will present two types of attacks: ICMP floods and IP fragmentation.

From this course on how to prevent DDoS attacks, you will learn more techniques for preventing DDoS. You will also be able to download documents, discussing the process of testing websites or web services against DDoS.