This time of the year is always very cheerful. It’s the holiday season; everyone is happy and excited with all the festivities going on. But it’s important to be careful, especially during the holidays and going into the new year. Hackers prey during this time period, distractions from the season are all around. Hackers need more bots in their botnets around this time of the year, which is why they increase the volume of attacks. This directly impacts web-hosting companies, which is where BitNinja can help– holidays and beyond! Be aware of some of the things that may happen this holiday season and take a look below.
Online Shopping
One of the best ways to beat the crowds during the holiday season is by going online rather than to brick-and-mortar stores or shopping malls. Hackers understand the appeal for average consumers to shop online, and by taking advantage of the high traffic during the holiday season, will attempt to grab your personal information. Zscaler published an article about a fake Amazon app which installs malware onto someone’s phone. It’s important to understand that by downloading anything you are vulnerable to attacks. Always make sure the source is legitimate, because just deleting the app or closing the browser isn’t going to keep you safe.
Gaming Servers
Many kids (and adults—it’s part of the holiday spirit!) receive games during this season. Games that connect to online servers allow for online gameplay and interaction. Taking down a server denies all of these players, new and old, from experiencing their online games. Steam, a PC platform for games, is one of many targets, as well as still-popular Minecraft servers. Last year, Steam was hacked through a DDoS attack, where servers got flooded with 2000% more traffic than usual. The hackers got away with credit card information, as well as emails and phone numbers. It’s almost become some kind of terrible tradition, with gaming servers being targeted around this time every year.
BitNinja provides support against a few versions of DDoS attacks. We use DoS protection for these, and our anti-flood module is responsible to keep your server from getting overloaded by our greylisted IPs. Click here to see the modules we use to protect your servers:
https://bitninja.io/features/
StaySafeOnline and McAfee also published a few tips for the holiday season.
We wish you a happy and safe holiday season!