DDoS Attacks: The Silent Threat Crippling Businesses. Are You Prepared?

If you run any kind of online business, you rely on your website and internet infrastructure to operate, make sales, and ensure customers can access your services. But there’s an insidious threat out there that threatens to cut off that connectivity and bring your business operations to a grinding halt — sometimes instantly, sometimes for days at a time or longer.

We are talking about DDoS attacks. 

For most people, DDoS attacks were once seen as a vague internet boogeyman — more theoretical than something to be considered an actual concern. But make no mistake, they now pose a very clear and present danger that can severely disrupt operations (for both large and small businesses). 

So, let’s break down what exactly DDoS attacks are, recent trends showing the growing danger, and most critically, what you need to do to protect yourself before it’s too late.

What Is a DDoS Attack?

First, a quick DDoS primer in plain English.

DDoS stands for “distributed denial of service.” These attacks work by flooding websites, web applications, servers, and network communications infrastructure with fraudulent traffic from multiple sources. Their goal is to overload these systems and grind them to a dysfunctional halt. Some major characteristics of DDoS assaults:

• They leverage large networks of remotely compromised devices, often consumer electronics like DVRs or internet-connected cameras. Hackers cobble these innocent appliances together into powerful “botnets” capable of blasting incredibly high amounts of bogus requests at targets.
• Attacks can blast targets with different types of malicious traffic. The three main types are TCP floods hammering server resources, UDP floods eating up bandwidth, and application attacks targeting web app layers and databases.
• Assault duration varies wildly, too. Some DDoS episodes last under an hour, while others persist for multiple days or longer. Attackers often hit in short bursts and then return intermittently to prolong outages.

As you’ll see, this combination of hijacked devices generating floods of malicious traffic makes DDoS tremendously disruptive and difficult to fully prevent.

By the Numbers: Attacks Are Spiking

In 2024 alone, Cloudflare reported a 20% year-over-year increase in DDoS attacks of all types. These digital assaults targeted everything from small online shops to Fortune 500 corporations across industries.

As our world grows increasingly interconnected and dependent on online systems and infrastructure, DDoS attacks are also becoming more frequent and more sophisticated in nature.

Yet despite this escalating threat, a lot of businesses still regard DDoS protection as an afterthought at best. They wrongly assume that an attack seems unlikely to happen to them specifically. However, this outlook changes pretty quickly when your website or online platform gets knocked completely offline during peak revenue hours on Black Friday weekend, for example. 

Think about it: could your business afford over 24+ hours of downtime and lost sales? For most operations in today’s digital economy, the hard truth is no.

The inconvenient reality is that DDoS attacks pose a very real threat to organizations of all shapes and sizes in the modern age — and it can no longer be ignored or dismissed as some distant, irrelevant issue. 

Why Care About DDoS? Widespread Risks and Costs

DDoS often looks like isolated tech trouble from the outside. “Oh, their site is just down for maintenance again,” people observing outages may think. But for affected companies, the business impacts bite hard and fast. Following on from the previous section, here are some of the common consequences that victims of DDoS attacks experience:

• Lost revenue as you’re unable to close sales, take purchases or reservations, onboard clients, deliver services, and more while your website is crippled.
• Inability to access inventory systems, operational tools, business analytics, and other data sources that are necessary to make day-to-day decisions. Flying blind compounds revenue uncertainty.
• Customers rage as they fail repeatedly to use your platform and cannot get questions answered or issues resolved without connectivity. Their lifetime value swiftly nosedive.
• Missed opportunities when site downtime makes you invisible to new visitors and prospects suddenly considering competitors instead.
• Even after attacks end, lingering SEO and marketing damage can hamper awareness and trust for months.

And those represent just immediate business impacts before considering longer-term ripples like partners questioning reliability or security auditors flagging vulnerabilities.

Oh, and to make matters worse, ransom demands typically get issues right after these attacks, with criminals threatening repeated takedowns if you don’t pay exorbitant fees. Now your business faces extortion on top of all the disruption.

Clearly, these website outages from DDoS are no mere inconvenience. They severely threaten operational capacity, customer trust, and ongoing success.

Defending Your Organization Before Disaster Strikes

At this point, hopefully, you’re convinced to take the DDoS threat seriously, even if attacks seem improbable. The question then becomes: What can you do to protect yourself?

Many businesses wrongly assume their web host or internet service provider shields them. In truth, they are partially right (since hosts do block a few basic attacks). But in reality, standard hosting services cannot handle large DDoS floods. Very few offer the focused expertise to quickly mitigate sophisticated app-layer assaults that target web apps and databases directly. Relying solely on them leaves you massively exposed.

The only proven solution is implementing dedicated DDoS prevention yourself. There are solutions out there that sit between your infrastructure and the internet to absorb DDoS attacks before they touch your actual servers. Key advantages such purpose-built services provide:

• Network-wide protection neutralizing attacks targeting websites, servers, cloud resources, etc. There’s no need to try and safeguard individual components.
• Capacity to withstand collateral damage from large floods of traffic without breaking a sweat. Remember – DDoS leverages thousands of compromised devices, so DDoS protection services need to be able to scale rapidly, too.
• Automatic detection and mitigation responding within seconds — far faster than IT teams could manually. This minimizes downtime and customer impact.
• Ongoing monitoring, reporting, and alerts to keep you informed of active threats.

Final Word

When it comes to internet security threats like DDoS attacks, it’s easy to think, “that won’t happen to my business” or “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” But here’s the hard truth – attacks are spiking rapidly year after year, and unless you properly prepare, you’re leaving yourself wide open to catastrophic disruption.

But the fallout is not pretty when unprotected businesses are ambushed by large-scale floods of malicious traffic. We’re talking about a significant amount of revenue lost from extended outages, countless angry customers, security audits raising red flags, you name it.

So, don’t wait until it’s too late. Recognizing the very real and growing danger of DDoS attacks is the first step. The next step is to put proper protection in place proactively. While no solution is foolproof, having a purpose-built DDoS mitigation standing guard in front of your internet assets is like having a team of digital bodyguards ready to deflect any threat 24/7. That peace of mind is priceless in today’s volatile online world.