Last week, DynDNS – a major DNS provider was hit with a large Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. As a result major websites like Twitter, Spotify, Etsy and many other sites were knocked offline.

What is a DDoS attack?

The goal of a DDoS attack is to overwhelm a server or servers so that they no longer work and essentially, shut down. An attack is typically started by a cluster of servers that targets and sends out multiple requests by bots to a server or group of servers in order to shut down the operations on the targeted servers.

What does this mean for you?

By now, I am sure you are wondering what all of this means for you. Is your website or online banking site vulnerable to these kinds of attacks?

First, you need to know that all services hosted online are vulnerable to attacks.

Second, we here at CU*Answers do not use public DNS services like DynDNS because we have our own DNS infrastructure. So, while this means that we were mostly safe from the cyber attacks from last week, it doesn’t mean that we are completely invulnerable to this kind of thing.

We mitigate these risks by doing the following:

• All our servers are housed in SSAE16 Certified Data Centers
• Our servers are secured by using the latest standard server-hardening techniques and security software
• We take a proactive approach to server management. Therefore, our servers are heavily monitored 24/7. Additionally, we take care to make sure that our servers are updated regularly

As cyber attacks become more sophisticated, we are consistently adapting our security procedures to be able to prevent and stop any threats.