[caption id="attachment_778" align="aligncenter" width="550"] DDOS attack by Fake Google bots[/caption] In the cyber security branch, DDOS is an area where lot of research work is going on. The use of fake Googlebots in DDOS attack is increasing day by day. According marketing intelligence report more than 50 million fake Googlebots visits more than 10,000 websites every month. 23.5% of these 50 million fake bots are used for 7 layer DDOS attack. 34% of the fake Googlebots are extremely malicious.

What is DDOS attack?

DDOS stands for Distributed Denial of service attack. It is an extended version of DOS attack. In DOS attack, large numbers of small packets are continuously sent over the server in quick succession. This will increase the load over the server. The server would not be able to identify the fake traffic and real traffic thus it will get crash and the website would get down. In DOS attack the small packets are sent from a single computer and it becomes easy for a server to identify the IP address from which large numbers of packets are coming. Thus the server will block that IP address and will easily overcome from it.

Also SEE: SQL Injection attack

Talking about DDOS attack, it is almost similar to DOS attack with one major difference. The difference is that the packets are sent from different IP addresses and over different locations. Now the server would not be able to identify the fake traffic easily.  

What are Googlebots?

Crawlers are used to scan the whole website and index them in the search engine. Google's main crawler is Googlebots. An example of Fake Googlebots is Mr Hack and that of original one is Dr Crawlit.

Also See: DNS Sinkhole, the best way to protect your website from malware attack

Why to use Fake Googlebots in DDOS attack?

Fake Googlebots abruptly increases the visitors over the website; this will put a sudden load over the website. The problem is that the website owner can't block the Googlebots. If he does this then it would also block the real Googlebots and the end would be that the entire SEO ranking would get spoiled. [caption id="attachment_779" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Fake Googlebots VS Real Googlebots in DDOS attack[/caption]

Popular tools for DDOS attack

Fake Googlebots are much handier because of their unique ID's. Website owners still depend on the complete inspection of the traffic in order to distinguish between the fake and genuine. These methods require an experience and are time consuming. Still at the end there is a dilemma between the both as a result the DDOS attack bells goes off and website gets down. [caption id="attachment_780" align="aligncenter" width="597"] Popular tools for DDOS attack[/caption]

How to protect from DDOS attack?

Till date ASN verification method is the only method with which the difference between the fake and real Googlebots can be made. It is a combination of security heuristics and IP address verification. The algorithm used behind the method is the identification of the origin.  

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