Companies invest more in DDoS protection

Pretty much every company out there has been, or will be a target of a DDoS attack. A new report by real-time information services provider Neustar, entitled The Threatscape Widens: DDoS Aggression and the Evolution of IoT Risks, released this month, says it’s no longer the question of "if" or "when" a company will be DDoSed -- it’s how often and how long will it last.

According to the report, 73 percent of companies were attacked in 2015, with 82 percent of those attacked suffering multiple attacks. Out of that number, 45 percent said they were attacked six times, or more. In EMEA, 47 percent of companies were attacked at least five times.

The survey was based on a sample of 1,000 companies.

It also suggests that DDoSing is not its own purpose -- it’s a means to an end, in many cases. More than half of companies (57 percent) said a DDoS attack is usually followed by data theft, which can be customer data, financial or intellectual property. In half of the cases, the companies would lose $100,000 per hour because of a DDoS attack in peak hour -- sometimes going as high as $250,000.

All of this has forced more companies (76 percent) to invest more in DDoS protection.

"The findings of our most recent report are clear: attacks are unrelenting around the world but organizations are now recognizing DDoS attacks for what they are -- an institutionalized weapon of cyber warfare -- and so are protecting themselves", says Rodney Joffe, head of IT Security Research at Neustar. "We present the data from our third DDoS survey as a means to inform the public of the dangers associated with DDoS attacks, and advance a conversation about the importance of multi-layered cybersecurity. This should be a discourse that reaches from security through to marketing, as when a DDoS attack hits, the reverberations are felt like a domino effect throughout all departments".

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