In this modern day and age, it is critical to keep your digital data safe. One way to do this is through encryption. Learn about seven innovative ways to encrypt your email attachments in the post below. The Dark Web is the online equivalent of a seedy underbelly. It’s where criminals and hackers hide, meeting up in secret to discuss their nefarious activities. Learn how to access this dark place from your browser in the post below.
On this page you will find information on everything from protecting yourself against an attack to understanding what happened when you were hacked. Read on for more details now! Learn the basics of how to hack back against cyber criminals with this helpful guide.
What Is a DDoS Attack?
A Distributed Denial of Service attack is when multiple computers, sometimes numbering in the thousands, flood a website or server with so much traffic that it becomes impossible for legitimate users to access the site. The goal of an attacker in a DDoS attack is to make it difficult for you to do business online or otherwise access your resources.
But why would someone want to bring down your site? It could be because they want to steal your data and use it for themselves, or because they’re angry at you and want revenge. In order to stop these attacks from happening, it’s important that you understand what causes them , and how you can mitigate them.
The anatomy of a DDoS attack
DDoS attacks are usually carried out by one or more botnets. A botnet is a collection of infected computers (also known as nodes) that an attacker controls. The software that the attacker installs on the computers is called malware, which gives the attacker control over those infected machines. These nodes run programs called zombies, and they work together to perform tasks for their master – in this case, attacking your website.
As part of a DDoS attack, the zombie programs flood your server with requests for information until it can’t handle any more traffic – at which point legitimate users can’t access it either! The flood of data comes from many different sources all at once, so it’s hard to tell where the attack is coming from.
As an example, if your site gets attacked by 2,000 zombies, each machine will send 100 requests per second (RPS). A typical server can handle about 10 RPS before it crashes. This means that in a very short amount of time, you could have 20 times more traffic than you’re capable of handling – and this can cause your site to crash entirely!
The best way to prevent a DDoS attack is to use a Cloudflare CDN . If you don’t know what that means yet, just keep reading…
What Is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare , formerly known as Project Honey Pot , is a company with servers around the world. These servers act as a sort of shield between your website and the rest of the internet.
Cloudflare’s network is built to handle huge amounts of traffic, so if someone decides to attack your site with a DDoS attack, Cloudflare will absorb all that extra traffic until you ask them to stop.
In this situation, Cloudflare acts like an electric shock absorber for your website – handling all the extra traffic until you can get it under control (we’ll talk about how to do that in just a moment).
You might be thinking: “But what about my visitors? Won’t they see a slowdown?” The answer is no. Visitors won’t notice any difference when using Cloudflare because it caches all the content on your website.
Cloudflare will serve all the cached pages from its own servers, so visitors don’t have to make any additional requests for those resources.
How Cloudflare Works
Cloudflare uses a combination of its global network and advanced technology to protect websites from malicious traffic, DDoS attacks, and downtime. In this chapter we’ll explain how Cloudflare does it. We’ll cover:
What is a DNS? Domain Name System (DNS)
A DNS is like an Internet phone book that maps domain names (like www.example.com ) to IP addresses (like 1.2.3.4 ). Every time you type in a domain name into your web browser, your computer contacts a DNS to figure out what IP address to connect to. Cloudflare is a DNS provider that operates a global network of DNS servers that are faster than the traditional DNS resolvers used by most ISPs and hosting providers.
Why is My Website Slow?
The Problem with Caching Historically, if you wanted better performance for your website visitors, you would install your own caching proxy server in front of your web server(s). But if the caching proxy was down or slow, then every visitor who tried to access your site would be greeted with an error page. This problem gets worse as your traffic increases because each time a visitor comes to the site, they will experience some kind of failure before they can get back on their way. Over time this results in high user frustration, especially for users who are accustomed to faster response times. To solve this problem, we deploy a global network of caching proxy servers that serve your content and handle the majority of requests before they even reach your web server(s). This allows us to reduce database load and increase site performance overall.
Global Network Today’s Internet is not just a collection of websites; it is a network of networks with multiple paths available between any two points on the globe. By leveraging multiple carriers and ISPs around the world, our CDN can provide better connectivity than if you were hosting in one location. And since we peer directly with many large carriers, we can offer low-latency connections (often as fast as 1ms) where others can’t.
We offer global-scale, low-latency cloud hosting via our strategically placed data centers in the US and Europe. Our network is designed to route around congestion and latency hotspots, so your users always connect to the nearest location with the lowest latency.
Our network architecture was designed from day one with a “network of networks” approach that leverages multiple carriers and ISPs as well as over a dozen premium transit providers for optimal performance across all locations.