Routine testing of company security systems might have highlighted vulnerabilities and weaknesses in systems and processes. In both cases, the companies involved had invested time, money and effort in IT security, but when it came to the actual attack, that security failed, the investment was wasted, and they suffered financial and reputational losses anyway. TalkTalk’s share price dropped from 289.4 (October 20th, 2015) to 225.3 (October 26th, 2015) in the aftermath of the attack. More recently in October 2015, UK Telecoms company TalkTalk suffered an attack that simultaneously degraded the performance of their services (DDoS), as well as involving the theft of account information for hundreds of thousands of customers. DDoS attacks are being used in concert with attempts to penetrate networks and/or steal data, and this is changing the way that businesses have to calculate the risk of loss on DDoS attacks – as well as the way that counter-measures need to be deployed.Īs examples – in May 2011, Sony sent a letter to the US Congress, explaining that they did not immediately detect the theft of up to 101 million customer records because it was distracted by DDoS attacks. DDoS attacks are no longer simply a risk to the availability of an IT system or service. But until recently – many companies see DDoS as a nuisance, and not a threat to data. If the risk is sufficiently large, then the budget is usually set aside for mitigation. The severity of the risk will, of course, depend on how much that business relies on its online systems for revenue, a matter discussed previously in the earlier risk assessment white paper. In the spectrum of threats to simulate – DDoS has traditionally been lower on the agenda than vulnerability assessments or penetration tests.ĭDoS creates a risk for businesses that conduct any transactions using public Internet services. Regardless of the possible severity of the consequences, testing systems are nowhere near ubiquitous – there always seems to be something higher on the IT agenda and in greater need of spend from the limited IT budget. However, a lot of the time, the process of testing the security of IT systems that support a business is not second nature. Some of the time it seems automatic, almost second nature many of us test our house door handle after we have just locked the door, for example. Testing your security makes sense when we think about our homes. In this article, I will discuss various aspects of DDoS testing – starting at the decision whether to test your company’s ability to withstand DDoS attacks, the business case for testing, how to scale a test, what a DDoS should include and more.ĭDoS testing is relatively unknown compared to more ubiquitous testing services, such as penetration testing and server vulnerability assessments, and this guide tries to collate information specific to DDoS testing to inform businesses of all sizes about this kind of security testing and how it can help protect your business from attackers making use of DDoS attack tools. In the first two papers, I discussed the DDoS threat landscape, DDoS mitigation techniques and conducting risk assessments specifically for the threat of DDoS attacks against business. This is the third part of the activereach 2016/2017 guide to DDoS, DDoS mitigation and DDoS mitigation testing. Section 3 – Testing Distributed Denial of Service mitigation Section 2 – Assessing the business risk posed by Distributed Denial of Service attacks Section 1 – An introduction to Distributed Denial of Service attacks and mitigating them The guide is split into the following sections: This guide is aimed at technically aware business people who do not necessarily have a background in data networking or security. Welcome to the activereach 2016/2017 guide to DDoS, DDoS mitigation, and DDoS mitigation testing. By Max Pritchard, pre-sales consultant, activereach
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