Business Checks

We have so much to worry about when we own a business, and concerned so much about check fraud with quickbooks business checks,  but what about a DDOS attack to your company website? Are you prepared and protected? There is 8 things you need to know and tips to reduce the rick. A DDOS is a “distributed denial-of-service.”

Assess Your Company’s Risk. If your company process alot of transactions on online, or has Web-dependent operations, then it is important to take DDoS security seriously. Every business should sit down with its IT team and discuss what would happen to the company’s operations if it was hit by a denial-of-service attack.

Create DDoS Mitigation Policy.Make sure your network admin has taken some basic steps to limit the company’s risk exposure to denial-of-service attacks. There are several steps this person can take, including using caching, CDNs, static home pages, scaling and have burstable network connections, standby servers and infrastructure to handle traffic spikes, etc.

Performance Monitoring. Its important to monitor and  realize this, but it can actually be quite difficult to realize or detect that a site is under attack. Many types of cyber attacks slow down the site, or make it unusable, but don’t actually bring it down. Properly configured/tuned performance monitoring can be a major help in detecting an attack. Spikes in unsual traffic is usually a good sign to be on the look out for.

Have a Response Team in Place. When a denial-of-service attack happens, your company needs to know who to turn to and what to do right then. Whether this is in-house IT staff or externals, there needs to be a clear hierarchy of responsibility. Know who to call at the hosting provider, vendors, and Internet Service Providers to coordinate DDoS response. Responding quickly to an attack is critical to getting it resolved effectively.

Buy Anti-DDoS Solutions. Their is software that is specifically designed to identify and stop denial-of-service attacks. This can be a helpful addition to the other mitigation plans you have in place. Such products include Arbor Peakflow SP, Cisco/Arbor Clean Pipes 2.0, etc. The best defense against DDoS is having a lot of bandwidth. When Amazon was attacked, they overcame it by having extra bandwidth and great backup system in place

Outsource to a Large Hosting Provider. A large hosting provider can supply increased bandwidth, which is the best way to guard against an attack. However, by outsourcing your website hosting to a large third-party provider, you can also reduce the risk of a direct attack – but keep in mind that you now run the risk of getting involved in an indirect or incidental attack that targets that hosting provider. Great thing about third-party hosting providers is that they have a significantly larger amount of capacity as well as in-house DDoS mitigation plans in place.

Have a Back-Up Ready. It may not be possible to prevent every DDoS attack, which is why companies are advised to establish a backup “mirror” website that can replace the original one if it comes under a sustained attack. The backup website should be hosted at a different location than the primary website. Best strategies: load balancing across machines, server farms and global server load balancing (GSLB) across data centers and continents. Always have a backup for a backup, as it will come in handy and save your company. Keep backups of your accounting programs as well. In case something happens you’ll be able to know what peachtree business checks that was previously written and/or has cleared the bank. Ordering checks is easy to do if you are low.

Get Insurance. Another element of protection your business might want to consider is “cyber insurance.” This is a relatively new field of insurance, but one that is catching on quickly among large businesses that have a lot to lose in cyber attacks and data thefts. There are many different types of cyber insurance coverage, including privacy and security liability in case critical data is lost or stolen, lost earnings, etc. However, for the purposes of DDoS protection, the best coverage to have here would be for “crisis management.” This can help cover the costs of getting the network back up and running, as well as restoring lost or damaged data. Call your insurance company and see if you qualify.

Unfortunately for businesses, distributed denial-of-service attacks are a difficult problem. They are becoming more common and they’re not easy to protect against. Businesses shouldn’t rely on the authorities to be able to effectively intervene on their behalf. With these criminal activities, companies need to rely on themselves. By using a multi-strategy approach that combines prevention, remediation and recovery provisions, your business can reduce its level of exposure to this growing threat. Keep your business checks, like quickbooks business checks safe from anyone else, but only those that is in the accounting department.  Just wanted to add that in while were talking about protection.