Denial of Service attacks on web servers are increasing, according to Akamai Technologies in its most recent "State of the Internet" report (http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet). And breaking news over the past 2 days raises the profile of DoS (or DDoS - distributed denial of service) attacks as leading news outlets report that a main cause of the poor performance of the federal Obamacare website and of some state health care marketplace sites has been Dos attacks by healthcare opponents.
The danger of a DoS attack to your business is that such strikes can bring down hundreds or thousands of websites as a result of the coordinated draining of resources from networks. The Akamai study and the recent Obamacare woes highlight that DoS attacks are a very real threat to any business who operates online, whether from malicious hackers based in Indonesia and China or by hired guns working for political or business special interests.
Enter Google. The data and software giant launched "Project Shield" in late October to help protect small websites stay online during DoS attacks. Project Shield essentially enables small site owners to serve their content "through Google" in order to withstand DDoS attacks and not go offline.
The product isn't quite ready for prime time, but soon businesses that operate websites that don't host thousands of unique visitors per day should see relief as businesses face the reality of increase DoS attacks in the coming months.
