DDoS Chaos
1st April 2025
In 2024, Cloudflare’s DDoS defence systems blocked approximately 21.3 million DDoS attacks: do you have any protections in place?
Do you remember earlier this month when X (formerly Twitter) became unavailable for a few hours? At first nobody was sure what was happening, and after 6 hours the platform was up and running again, but owner Elon Musk confirmed later in the day that it was due to a cyber-attack, a DDoS attack claimed by hacktivist group Dark Storm.
For people who use X to make their money, they were left without a way to work for most of a day. Furthermore, X’s value dipped after the attack, showing that even for a massive company owned by a billionaire, cyber-attacks can be devastating.
But what is a DDoS attack? A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is when a cyber-criminal or criminal group attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic.
This swell of traffic is created by attackers using botnets: these malware infected bots are controlled remotely by the attacker, sending a huge volume of requests to the targeted service to overload its ability to handle legitimate traffic, making the service slow or completely unusable.
There are three different types of attacks: volume based (that attempt to consume bandwidth), protocol attacks (exploit weaknesses in networks to consume resources) and application layer attacks (target specific applications or services to disrupt functionality).
How can a DDoS attack be prevented? Rate limiting reduces the number of requests a server can handle from one single IP address, while traffic filtering uses firewalls and other security measures to filter out malicious traffic. Additionally, services like Cloudflare (which X has since enabled DDoS protections from) or Akamai can be employed to absorb and mitigate DDoS attacks.
Luckily for you, Interfuture Security has you covered, working tirelessly to prevent an attack from occurring and supporting you if the worst should happen – maybe Elon Musk should give us a call!
You (and Elon) can contact us HERE.