One Way an Attacker Can Crash the Cloud

by | Oct/11/2012

“Everything is moving to the cloud.” An attacker can bring cloud services to their knees—and how will that affect your business?

You may use “online” versions of your CRM, ERP, Bookkeeping, Office products, off-site backup storage, have your own shopping cart, etc.

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack can certainly cripple your organization – at least from an IT perspective.

A Distributed Denial of Service attack works like this:

First: An attacker infects thousands of computers around the world—including home computers—via “spreading a virus.”

Second: The attacker instructs each of those thousands of computers to simultaneously create an enormous “Traffic Jam” at some location by flooding that location with data traffic.

The flood of traffic prevents all access to the Internet.

At the recent Black Hat conference, Jeff Moss—the founder of Black Hat, shared that we have to stop DDoS attacks, and attackers can launch traffic jams so huge that it is impossible to thwart the attack.

Every time we find out a way to stop DDoS attacks, attackers take their game to a higher level. There are ways to shore up defenses and the better the defense, the more expensive it is. There is no “guaranteed” protection against a DDoS attack.

Make sure your Disaster Recovery Plan and Business Continuity Plan addresses DDoS attacks against your organization. Also address the possibility of losing access to email, VoIP, Online Shopping Carts, web connections, online backup, and “the cloud” as you know.