A third more UK businesses faced distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in 2013, with some attacks lasting up to two days.
According to research of 331 companies by Neustar, over 35 per cent more UK companies were hit by DDoS attacks in 2013 compared with 2012. It also found that there were a greater number of longer-lived attacks in 2013, with 28 per cent lasting up to two days. Also once attacked, there is a 69 per cent chance of a repeat attack and more than 48 per cent were targeted between two and ten times.
Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and technology fellow at Neustar, said: “Organisations must remain constantly vigilant and abreast of the latest threats. As an example, Neustar’s UltraDNS network suffered an attack just last week peaking at over 250Gbps – a massive attack by industry standards. Even with proper mitigations in place, the attack caused an upstream ripple. It is a constantly changing threat landscape.”
The research found that the majority (39 per cent) of DDoS attacks require more than six people to mitigate an attack, while DDoS mitigation requiring more than ten people doubled, from 12 per cent of those surveyed in 2012, to nearly 24 per cent in 2013.
Among the key findings from the survey, a third of companies estimate losses of over £240,000 per day during a DDoS outage.
Quocirca analyst Bob Tarzey told IT Security Guru that looking at various data sources, it would seem that DDoS is increasing, but also that organisations ability to detect it is too.
