The term DDoS attack may be one that you are unfamiliar with but it can have grave consequences to your dedicated server and your website. If you are new to the term, it stands for Distributed Denial of Service and anyone who has an online presence should be aware of it. If you have a website, you need to be reliable and offer great service to customers and this is why these attacks are bad for business.

For a DDoS attack, a number of compromised computers, or bots, form into a collective, referred to as botnets and are used by cyber attackers to carry out a range of attacks online.

This is a tame attack compared to the more serious crimes of identity theft and intelligence gathering that will often be the motivation for a cyber attacker to strike. The range of attacks available to a cyber attacker means that every firm and individual online should be aware of what they can do to minimize the overall impact.

One of the major concerns regarding DDoS attacks is the level of power and opportunity that a small number of users have. It is reported that a collective group of around 20,000 computers has the ability to cause serious disruption for over 90% of the sites on the internet. This is a huge figure and gives some level of the problem people are dealing with when considering DDoS attacks.

It would be wrong to think that you will not be a target of a DDoS attack if you are not a political or commercial site. A cyber attacker can often have little motivation for attacking a particular site or server, sometimes acting for fun, malicious behaviour or to increase the number of compromised computers they can call upon.

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