Attack Prevention

The article that will be analyzed is “Prevent Denial of Service Attacks”, which was listed on the Applicure Technologies website. The article focuses on denial of services attacks which disable a website from being used by individuals. The article highlights why the attacks need to be prevented as small to medium websites with sound IT security policies have begun to be targeted by hackers. These attacks can impact a business especially if they sell most of their products online. These attacks can also prevent individuals from obtaining valuable information. The article does a good job of highlighting what can happen as a result of these attacks. The article also presents possible reasons for why these attacks may occur such as something as simple as a grudge being held against an organization. The article also provides some insight as to how these hackers launch denial of service attacks through buffer overflows or malformed data. This insight allows website developers to create ways to protect themselves from denial of services attacks by unknown hackers.

The article is lacking on clear guidelines or steps in preventing these attacks. The article provides some information about a firewall software, and an antivirus and antimalware software that can be used to prevent attacks. By only providing only one approach to preventing the attacks the article does not provide comprehensive advice to fight the attacks. The article could have highlighted other approaches that could be used such as the use of route-based packet filtering that Park (2001) studied. “We show that DPF achieves proactiveness and scalability, and we show that there is an intimate relationship between the effectiveness of DPF at mitigating DDoS attack and power-law network topology” (Park, 2001 15). While this is also one approach that has been shown to be effective, the article should include multiple approaches to preventing denial of services attacks. This would provide readers with various alternatives in protecting their website from denial of service attacks.  

References

Applicure. (nd). Preventing Denial of Service Attacks. Retrieved July 16, 2013, from http://www.applicure.com/solutions/prevent-denial-of-service-attacks.

Park, K., & Lee, H. (2001, August). On the effectiveness of route-based packet filtering for distributed DoS attack prevention in power-law internets. In ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 15-26). ACM.