Best Practices in Preparation for Denial of Service

Every year, new threats in the cybersecurity space present themselves. From malware to phishing, and now artificial intelligence, threats are evolving and growing more sophisticated every day. Denial of service (DoS) is just one of the many threats present in 2026, placing individuals, businesses and governments in harm’s way.

What is DoS?

DoS refers to a type of cyberattack that attempts to overload an organization’s online network, such as its website or servers, via a mass influx of artificially engineered internet traffic. Attackers aim to deteriorate the network’s performance to the point of complete inaccessibility, allowing them to seize information or other assets.

DoS frequently occurs in waves. Even if a targeted system successfully fends off one attack, others will likely occur soon after, each attempting to take down the system through different means. Assailants use this practice as a learning opportunity, effectively going through a trial-and-error process of the securities the network has in place. A successful DoS will trigger an outage capable of trickling negative effects even further into other areas of the network.

Distributed Denial of Service

DoS attacks can often be traced back to one origin; however, when an attack stems from multiple sources, it is known as a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).

DDoS is a formidable strike, often more effective than an ordinary DoS. Due to the sprawling nature of their origin, more harmful traffic can be generated from the onset of a DDoS. This wide net amplifies the intensity of the assault, now capable of overwhelming and crippling the target system in mere moments, and makes it more difficult for the victim to differentiate malicious traffic from that of legitimate users.

Preventative response measures

A primary focus in the prevention of DoS should be your system’s ability to detect an attack and mitigate its impact before causing significant damage. Despite your best efforts, the resources your organization has in place to service requests from true users may simply be overwhelmed by a DoS. To ensure your system can handle such an attack, it is worth considering the inclusion of graceful degradation in your response plan.

Graceful degradation is a system’s ability to function at partial capacity after a portion of it fails or becomes impaired. Rather than a complete collapse, graceful degradation allows a system to reduce its operations down to its core functionalities. By reducing the potential impact of a system failure, users remain able to utilize an operable, yet rudimentary, service.

Determined attackers will almost certainly find a way to hit an organization with more traffic than it can respond to on its own. To best minimize the effects of DoS, partnerships with third-party service providers can help. Among many benefits, such as support with practices like graceful degradation, internet service providers may be able to offer “packet scrubbing,” a means of analyzing and filtering incoming data, taking down anything that appears malicious.

Service providers can also assist in establishing an alert system for potential storage issues with your network. One DoS approach used by attackers is the consumption of a service’s available storage. By repeatedly writing masses of data and forcing the system to organize and record said data, storage capacity is wasted and quickly exhausted. The more storage your system has available, the less likely this method of DoS is to succeed, as more space requires more false data to fill it.

When faced with a DoS or DDoS attack, it is important to remain on high alert. Secondary waves that could hit your network may be more penetrative and detrimental than the preceding ones. Your organization should be aware of the points in its service where it could be overloaded, as attackers will exploit them, using them as entrances for their attempts to drain your resources. Ideally, a small number of staff members should be deployed to combat the initial DoS, reserving others for any follow-up attack, ensuring someone is always prepared and monitoring each point of your service.

Another way to protect your company’s financial information is to use a secure online banking platform like myTrustmark BUSINESS, as well as fraud prevention services such as ACH Alert, Positive Pay and Reverse Positive Pay. To learn more about these services, contact our Corporate Treasury Services team today at 855.731.0243.