Small companies that do business online are constantly under the growing web threats. Fake traffic can flood small businesses and cause real problems as the websites are usually shut down temporarily. This can lead to a great loss to the company both financially and to its reputation. E-commerce websites that rely mostly on web for their livelihoods are at great risk. Hackers are often behind these attacks and both the number and the nature of these attacks are rising, DDoS attacks are a growing threat.

Most people believe that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks require hundreds of hackers when in reality DDoS attacks can take place with just one person and a mere trickle of traffic. Some of the effects that take place are;

Penetration

The attacker gets inside your machine and can use it in anyway they wish. Private customer data such as passwords and credit card information are at great risk. They can be used for illegal purposes that your business is responsible for. The business can face several lawsuits from their customers for compromising their privacy and going against customer confidentiality agreements that were made. This type of attack can cause a great blow to the reputation of your business and label it as ‘untrustworthy’ for future dealings.

Flooding Attack

The attacker sends vast amounts of traffic at your system causing congestion so the legitimate messages from your customers cannot get through which can cause concern. These types of attacks usually involves a large number of machines causing a distributed denial of service attack that is hard to tackle. This denial of service to your customers can cause huge financial loss as customers get fed up for not getting service. Attackers often aim to vandalize, extort or shut down websites that can ruin your company’s reputation, customer database and resources.

With such devastating effects it is important for online businesses to set up DDoS protection in order to prevent such type of attacks.