Following the report that a securities company in Vietnam showed signs of a DDoS attack, let’s explore what a DDoS attack is and how it may affect securities companies and investors’ transactions.

What Are DoS and DDoS?

“DoS”, fully known as “Denial Of Service”, is a type of service denial attack. This is a common form of attack nowadays, which causes the target computer to be unable to process tasks in time, resulting in overload.

A DoS attack usually originates from a single location, meaning it comes from one point and uses only one IP range. You can detect and prevent it.

“DDoS”, fully known as “Distributed Denial Of Service”, is an attack aimed at exhausting server system resources and flooding Internet traffic, causing user access to the server to be disrupted, intermittent, or even completely inaccessible, potentially crippling the system or even an entire internal network.

• DDoS attacks are much stronger than DoS. The strength of this method lies in its distribution across multiple IP ranges, making it very difficult for the victim to detect and block.
• Hackers do not only use their own computers to attack a website or network system but also leverage millions of other computers to carry out the attack.

The Harm of DoS and DDoS

Here are the typical consequences caused by DDoS and DoS attacks:

• The systems and servers under a DoS attack will crash, preventing users from accessing them. For investors, system downtime can result in losses during transactions, especially during periods of high market volatility.
• Businesses that own the servers and systems will lose revenue and incur additional costs to fix the issues.
• When the network crashes, any tasks requiring network access cannot be performed, disrupting work and affecting productivity.
• If users try to access a crashed website, it affects the company’s reputation. Prolonged downtime may cause users to leave and choose alternative services.
• High-level DDoS attacks may even lead to theft of money or customer data.

Identifying whether a system is under a DDoS attack and who is behind it is not easy. Sometimes, there is ambiguity between a DDoS attack and simply a sudden spike in requests during a high-traffic period in the market. The slower the system becomes and the more requests it receives, the more severe the situation. Therefore, every company needs to constantly monitor its system, prepare incident scenarios, and upgrade technologies to ensure investors’ transactions are protected.

Some solutions include increasing bandwidth and continuously monitoring traffic. However, these are only temporary measures to buy time before an incident occurs. Using third-party DDoS mitigation services is also an effective way to prevent these attacks.

At InnoTech, our team of experts can help audit your system, analyze bottlenecks, and identify potential causes of system incidents. The service is maintained and reviewed monthly to ensure the system is always protected and operating at its best.