Last week our IT expert, Jeff Groby joined the crew over at The Big 550 KTRS for our weekly segment of Tech Talk! Jeff joined Guy Phillips and his hosts to discuss Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks and how these cyber crimes have impacted consumers and business owners in the past.
There is a difference between a denial-of-service attack and distributed denial-of-service, and Jeff was in the studio to shed some light on what makes these two cyber attacks similar yet different.
Denial-of-Service - This is a denial of service (DoS) attack where a cyber criminal seeks to make a device unavailable to its intended end users by disrupting the device's connection to the internet. This attack is simply orchestrated and can cause severe damage to the person or group that gets targeted. While data may not be lost as a result of this cyber threat, downtime still costs money.
Distributed Denial-of-Service - is one of the most common types of DoS attack end users are seeing today. During this type of attack, cyber criminals maliciously attempt to disrupt the average traffic of a targeted service, service, or network by overwhelming the target or its infrastructure with a massive influx of online traffic. Cyber criminals achieve this by utilizing a large group of compromised computer systems as sources of attack traffic. DDoS attacks can cause large amounts of downtime and have emerged as a massive cyber security threat to businesses.
Video game consoles are always a hot ticket item for the holiday season, and Christmas 2014 was no exception. Jeff brought up a pretty infamous DDoS attack that affected Sony and Microsoft networks around the holiday season for two days when many gamers were trying to set up their new machines.
This DDoS attack affected nearly 160 million gamers on Christmas Eve when both of the popular game networks were brought down. The attack overloaded both systems by generating fake access requests. An attack like this prevented people from playing games even if they had a physical copy because many consoles require online authentication. While their reasoning was unclear, it's safe to say these cyber criminals were channeling the Christmas spirit of the Grinch!
Staying educated on the different types of cyber attacks and knowing how to protect yourself or your business is what we're here for. Our IT Experts join Guy Phillips and his crew on The Big 550 KTRS every Friday afternoon at 4:20 to talk about all things technology and cyber security. The experts are so much more than budding radio personalities, to learn more about what they're up to daily, contact us to learn more about SumnerOne.