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RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS
can result in existence-threatening damages and hardware solutions that are upstream of
for online retailers, as they have a great re- the infrastructure. Which solution you should
sponsibility in securing customer data. Legis- choose depends mainly on the threat and
lative authorities see it also that way and your available budget. A quite cost-effective
therefore demand from them heightened pro- solution represents a novel ‘shared DDoS pro-
tection. tection’. In accordance with the cloud princi-
ple, several customers share a protection enti-
Clearly, the methods of hackers are becoming ty, which reduces the costs for the individual.
more and more sophisticated and threats are
steadily increasing. Irrespective of the fact that Better safe than sorry
security gaps in programs repeatedly reveal
data involuntarily, such gaps (as e.g. seen in Apparently, companies - whether big or small
the widespread Magento shop software) might - can fall prey to DDoS attacks or related at-
allow the inward transfer of a harmful program tempted extortion, therefore, shop owners
code into obsolete versions, putting dealers at should ensure early protection and not only
risk. That’s why it is highly recommended to when the blackmail has already been re-
use professional security solutions such as ceived. Because neither can protection be es-
Web Application Firewalls, preferably in com- tablished in time - usually the blackmailers
bination with a Customer IAM solution. give only 24 hours - nor do the aggressors
rest once they were successful with an extor-
You could be next tion.
The "State-of-the-Internet" report by Akamai Overall, a trend towards ever stronger and
shows similar results, namely that cyber- prolonged attacks is currently looming, as
attacks are a big risk for online shops, with the e.g.the Akamai report stated, claiming that the
number of attacks growing and the dimension number of attacks over 100 Gbit /s has risen
of attacks significantly increasing. It has now by 140%. Furthermore, many analysts as-
become quite easy to use the so-called sume that phenomena such as the Mirai bot-
"darknet" cyber-attacks on web shops, espe- net, which had captured unprotected IoT de-
cially since cybercrime has different character- vices as sources for DDoS attacks, will accu-
istics - from hacking over ransomware to mulate in the future and everybody is con-
DDoS attacks. vinced that attacks will become more complex
and often spread across multiple attack vec-
While usually common sense is sufficient – tors. So, try your best to stay safe and give
such as not to open any unknown data files or hackers like the Shadow Brokers – the group
using no outdated software - DDoS attacks believed to be linked to the leak of the US
require technical aids. Although any managed government’s cyberweapons – a hard time.
hosting provider runs by default a basic pro- Especially since they threatened to release
tection in the datacenter, that's unfortunately more hacking tools soon that are said to man-
in general not sufficient for major attacks. age exploiting newer computers running Win-
Therefore, additional DDoS mitigation solu- dows 10 or mobile devices using the Android
tions are offered. operating system. ◊
By Daniela La Marca
Roughly, it can be differentiated between CDN
-based solutions, DDoS scrubbing centers,
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