The Biggest DDoS in History Hits the BBC and Donald Trump’s Website
Cyber threats continue to get bigger and bigger each year. Last year, the Ashley Madison hack was considered the biggest breach in history. Just a few months later, hackers outdid themselves again and sent a 600-gigabyte DDoS attack on the official BBC website. Even with BBC’s higher end resource, it wasn’t enough to protect its servers against the attack and it resulted in a massive outage.
Who Was Behind the Attack?
Hackers have gotten much more political in recent years. At first, the BBC claimed that the outage was due to a technical failure. Later, they reported that a hacker group called New World Hacking was responsible. The anti-ISIS hacking group attacked the main website including sister companies such as its iPlayer service. The attack resulted in the BBC and its associated services were down for three hours on New Year’s Eve.
In addition to the BBC, New World Hacking also took credit for attacking Donald Trump’s main campaign website, DonaldJTrump.com.
DDoS Attacks are on the Rise
DDoS attacks continue to be one of the major cyber threats. Security professionals estimate that DDoS attacks are one of the biggest threats and they continue to increase in popularity for hackers.
New World Hackers aren’t the only group using DDoS attacks. The popular Anonymous hacking group often uses DDoS attacks to bring down large websites. The group has attacked Google, PayPal, Amazon, and several government entities. Some were successful while others failed. The ones who failed had some of the best security on the market. For instance, attacks against Google failed due to their innovative security that detects attempted DDoS attacks.
What makes these threats effective is that most companies don’t have the security defenses to detect and protect against these attacks. Without the right defenses, company resources and data are wide open to DDoS as well as other cyber threats.
Protecting Yourself
While you can’t completely defend your resources against cyber threats, millions of threats are created each day. You can’t 100% defend against threats, but you can greatly reduce the chance that your systems will fall victim to these attacks. Risk assessment, management, access policies, analytics, and penetration testing are all ways to defend your organization.
Don’t put security aside until it’s too late. Always hire a professional to review your network and identify any current vulnerabilities and security holes.
Originally published at www.apvera.com on January 9, 2016.
