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Hamlet Batista features an extensive piece on how to protect your site from Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks, deploying open source tools, notably Jonathan A. Zdziarski’s invaluable Apache module mod_evasive .

This has become a major concern for successful SEOs as much as for your run-of-the-mill sysadmin because in the age of Negative SEO, with lots of automation tools around to roll out just about every nasty trick in the book, chances that your well ranked sites will become a target some day are pretty high.

E.g. here at fantomaster, we currently experience a major DDOS onslaught about once a week now. (This is discounting the appr. 35K e-mail spam messages our systems fend off automatically on a daily basis…)

The issue with DDOS attacks is, of course, their being spread across slews of zombie servers, meaning that blocking a single IP (or even a handful or two) will do you little good. As he points out:

This is not a trivial attack by some script kiddie. DDOS is a serious and well-planned attack, usually with the purpose extorting ransom. The idea behind it is to exhaust the target server or network’s limited resources. Small attacks try to exhaust the server’s CPU or memory by sending a lot of fake requests. The main challenge blocking the attacks is being able to detect legitimate traffic from harmful traffic.

When it is a single script kiddie running a script to send overwhelming requests to your server, it’s enough to block his or her IP. A distributed attack is a whole different ballgame. Distributed attacks scale to a proportion that, no matter what you do, once your bandwidth is exhausted and your system is unable to sustain the number of invalid packets, your network will crumble.

Of course, like the crucified bunch singing in chorus in the 1979 Monty Python Life of Brian, flic, you are well advised to always look at the bright side of life:

I can’t say you will enjoy a DDOS if it happens to you, but think about it this way: you’re big enough to be attracting attacks. You’re a celebrity in your own right now.

So find out more about this perfidious method of knocking out competitors and what you can do to effectively protect your valuable web estate against it here:

Success Means Security: How to protect your most profitable web sites from distributed denial of service attacks (an open source approach)

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