ddos
Nearly half of companies recently surveyed by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International think they know who to blame for DDoS attacks targeted at them. While it isn’t easy to prove, many think it is competitors orchestrating these attacks.
The Corporate IT Security Risks Survey was conducted globally with more than 5,500 companies from 26 countries participating.
20% of companies with 50+ employees reported to have been the victim of at least one DDoS attack. The top “risk groups” are telecoms, financial services, and IT. 50% of DDoS attacks led to a noticeable disruption of services and 24% led to their total unavailability. 74% of attacks that led to a noticeable disruption of service coincided with a different type of security incident, such as a malware attack, network intrusion, or other type of attack – in other words, DDoS attacks were used as a smokescreen. 26% of DDoS attacks led to the loss of sensitive data. As always, among the burning questions for businesses, “whodunnit” stands out.
At least, after the fire has been extinguished.
Top suspects
The lion’s share of the “pie”, as can be seen below, is attributed to criminals seeking to disrupt the business’ operations. Two other sectors are also attributed to criminals: 18% of the surveyed said the DDoS attacks were motivated to disrupt services or distract attention from another, more clandestine kind of attack, and 17% of the surveyed said criminals launched their attacks and demanded ransom.
A surprisingly high percentage of the surveyed are sure their competitors orchestrated the DDoS attacks: 12%. Slightly less consider themselves the victims of political activists (11%), twice less – of governments/state powers (5%).
And just 8% have no idea who might have wanted to DDoS them.
Prevention instead of repair
DDoS attacks cost. A lot. As previously reported, on average, enterprises lose $417,000 as a result of a denial of service attack and SMBs lose $53,000. For large companies, DDoS is the 9th most expensive type of a breach, but for SMBs it’s the fourth most expensive, and the amount of loss is comparable to such incidents as network intrusion ($56K) and cyber espionage ($69K – the largest average recovery budget for SMBs). And we speak here about “isolated” damage from DDoS. If they are used as a decoy for other hostile activities, the damage may appear far greater.
Unfortunately, businesses still tend to view DDoS protection systems as something expensive (even prohibitively expensive at times) and complex. DDoS attacks are easy to launch, hard to beat, but at the same time they are not so omnipresent as spam and malware. Because of this, businesses often prefer to take risks, in hopes that they won’t be hit any time soon – but this is wishful thinking, not a practical approach.
In practice, security vendors such as Kaspersky Lab offer potent and efficient means to defend businesses from DDoS attacks. Taking technical challenges upon ourselves, we offer Kaspersky DDoS Protection solution, a protective complex to shield businesses from threat of DDoS-attacks.
Kindly proceed via this link to find out the working principles of this solution and what makes it effective.
