Happy holidays! Your Web server just died! I use the word ‘try’ very deliberately in my title. The truth of the matter is that there isn’t a damn thing you can do that will stop a serious distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. There are though some ways to try to deal with them.
Mind you, there is actually is a way that would put an end to most DDoS attacks. It requires that all Windows-based botnets be ripped out by the roots. Too bad, that’s not going to happen.
Windows is insecure by design and used by hundreds of millions and many of those users wouldn’t know an anti-virus program from Angry Birds. Millions of Windows computers, including maybe yours, are slave labor in one of the various botnets. Since we’re not going to be rid of Windows anytime soon and it’s not going to get any safer, the reality is that botnet-powered, brute-force DDoS attacks are only going to continue.
Actually, that’s not true. I think DDoS attacks are actually going more and more often. Here are some ways to mitigate them.