How can a botnet shut down your web site?

There are a lot of different threats that are on the internet right now but the one that anyone who has a popular web site fears is the dreaded botnet. Sure, your server may be able to be taken down by a virus or any other piece of malware but they are easy to recover from. A botnet is a whole different story. A botnet has the ability to shut down your web site without ever having to touch one piece of your hardware. It can send its zombie bots to do that. If this is the first time you have heard of a botnet then you might not know how it is able to do this and why it is such a big threat. In the following article we will explain the dynamics of the threat to you and your web site and how it is able to spread.

A botnet is a network of computers that are able to take commands from one central location. The amount of computers can be as little as a hundred or go up to as much as 100,000. They are able to get control of these computers by placing malware on the unsuspecting victims system. Once the malware is activated, it sits quietly waiting for the person who created it to give it commands. The person who is in control of these networks of computers is able to get them to do whatever they like. This means that if they want to send a large amount of spam email, they can without being detected. And the important part if you are a web site owner is that they are able to get these computers to focus on committing a DDOS attack. A DDOS attack is a Distributed Denial Of Service attack. They are able to do this by getting all of the computers that they control to focus on one server. They then start to make request to this server for certain resources. The amount of request become so much that they start to overwhelm the server. Now other people who are trying to get to the server are not able to get on. They have no idea that there is an attack happening to your server and they think that your site is broken. This makes the user not trust your now.

As you can see, a DDOS attack is a good reason for a web master to fear a botnet. You never know why someone is going to attack you with a DDOS attack. It might be a competing web site or it might be someone that is upset with you. Whatever the reason why someone is trying to attack you, they picked an effective way to do it. A DDOS attack is very hard to stop but there are ways to combat it. Make sure you check with your web site host to see if they know how to stop one.