Say Tata to web attacks

What is it? A service from the Tata Group that monitors web traffic to prevent a DDoS attack.

What is a DDoS attack? It is a Distributed Denial of Service attack on a website where internet rogues use hacked machines to simultaneously make tens of thousands of requests on a website. Since most website servers are not built to take such a load, they eventually crash and the website goes down.

What is the impact of a DDoS attack? Pretty severe if the website is an e-commerce site; downtime can mean lost revenues and is particularly harmful for internet-only companies, and internet criminals use this to ‘blackmail’ companies.

How will this service prevent DDoS? By monitoring traffic entering a site. The service will see if a sudden increase in traffic is malicious or not. If it is, it will prevent requests from being sent to the site server, preventing a ‘takedown’.

Will it work? It is unlikely that the service will be able to prevent a large scale DDoS attack, but it should be able to repel most attacks.

—Kushan Mitra