DDoS Attacks and Their Real Impact

DDoS attacks are nothing new to hosting and technology companies, but over the past 16 years, Hedgehog has seen that the number of these attacks as well as the scale of these attacks has grown and grown to levels that even the largest of companies cannot handle. 

Just last year, an absolutely massive DDoS attack that surged bandwidth well over 660 Gbps directly at the website of a prominent cyber security journalist forced Akamai to drop the website www.krebsonsecurity.com from its Prolexic DDoS mitigation service.  Since that time many other large DDoS attacks have continued to be seen across the hosting industry.

These DDoS attacks have essentially become the most effective form of censorship.  One major impact to the organization under attack is having to spend excessive time and money on the technical remediation of these attacks and that also shifts focus from their real work. But even more egregious is that many of the organizations that Hedgehog works with use their sites for advocacy and many times that advocacy is very time sensitive.  Massive attacks that cause site interruptions can render a campaign absolutely powerless.  These losses, while often measured on a balance sheet, can have far greater implications.  Any organization that has experienced an attack during a critical moment, either an election cycle or any other time-sensitive campaign, can tell you that the loss of traffic can yield far greater damage.

So if the larger providers of DDoS mitigation cannot handle these attacks, where does it leave smaller companies like Hedgehog?  It reminds us that technology is there to help fend off attacks, but the people behind the technology are absolutely necessary to handle the real-time mitigation from any such attack.  That is what we continue to focus on at Hedgehog Technology Services.