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This Wednesday, at around 22:30 GMT our website — and a whole load of others — was brought down by a DDOS attack on our server facilities in the US. In fact, at time of writing, our datacentre is still under attack

A DDOS attack is a distributed denial-of-service attack and is essentially when a large network of computers floods a server with requests for pages, eventually crippling it so that it cannot respond to normal requests from readers such as you.

You might have experienced a similar thing when trying to buy tickets for an event where all of the tickets go on sale at the same time. So many eager spectators try to access the ticketing site all at the same time that the server simply cannot cope, and you end up with thousands of disgruntled customers taking to Twitter or the Daily Mail to express their dismay at bungling ticket merchants.

This attack was a highly sophisticated one that brought down our AT&T datacentre as well as nine others across the East Coast of the United States.

Attacks such as these are increasingly common, with some of the largest companies in the world having been impacted by them in the past 12 months — including Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, and even the FBI.

For us, this is the first time that our network has been brought down for at least 13 years, and obviously for IFSEC Global.com, having only launched two weeks ago, this is certainly the first time.

Now, obviously, the irony of being a website that covers the global security and fire industries being brought down by a cyberattack is not lost on me.

In fact, in many ways it’s been a unique insight into the pain that businesses can feel as a result of being targeted (though in this case, I understand we weren’t specifically targeted, just unlucky collateral damage).

How would your business cope?

As a global media business, we have extremely capable IT experts, but they were only able to bring our websites back up almost 24 hours after they went down.

The question you should ask yourself is: If your website were brought down by a similar incident tomorrow, how would your business cope, and how much would it cost you? Every hour that your website is down could mean hundreds or even thousands of pounds in potential lost leads for you.

There are a number of steps that you need to have taken:

• How long would it be until you even noticed that your website server was down? Have you set up automatic alerts for server downtime? If not, it could be hours or even days before you realise that your website is inaccessible.
• Make a list of the key contacts at your host and ISP who will be able to tell you what is going on and when they think the attack might be over.
• Now that you know your server is under attack, ask yourself if you’ve backed up your website recently. If you have a reasonably small website then you can get this set up with a new host relatively quickly. If you have a more complex website then you might want to follow the advice of DDOS specialist Mike Smith and create a smaller, simpler webpage that gives basic information about your business and services, and use another host to serve it.
• Once the attack is over, analyse what happened and how well your response coped.

If you’re of a more technical mindset, you might want to take a look at this network DDOS incident response cheat sheet. The key steps are grouped under: preparation; analysis; mitigation; wrap-up.

As these kinds of attacks become more and more common, I sincerely hope this is the last time I write an article such as this.