DDoS Attacks Are on the Rise. Is Your Network Prepared?
“Absolutely, DDoS attacks are becoming more dangerous to enterprises,” Meyran said. “We see significant increases in attack complexity and duration of attack campaigns.” Indeed, attacks lasting more than one week doubled from 2011 to 2012, a year in which they employed “more complex attack vectors—note the number of attacks with a complexity level of 7-10.”
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He added that this new wave of longer, stronger DDoS attacks target the main weakness of most enterprises: they are not capable of sustaining a long-lasting attack campaign, nor do they have the protection tools or the expertise to fend off emerging attack vectors.
Service providers can now supply their enterprise customers with meaningful DDoS scrubbing, monitoring and protection. There’s a clear case to be made that enterprises without robust protection from DDoS attacks are making themselves vulnerable to a credible, not to mention expensive, threat.
Neustar’s “2012 Annual DDoS Attack and Impact Survey: A Year-to-Year Analysis” revealed that a whopping 35 percent of the companies it surveyed fell victim to an attack last year. Meanwhile, 39 percent of retailers were successfully targeted (up from 16 percent just one year earlier), and 41 percent of e-commerce businesses reported that they’d been hit.
The economic impact of these attacks is potentially devastating. Seventy-four percent of the enterprises surveyed by Neustar said that a DDoS attack and subsequent shutdown of their websites would cost them up to $10,000 per hour, while the other 26 percent said the hourly figure would range anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000.
“With the number of high-profile attacks steadily increasing, the market for DDoS prevention solutions has seen steady growth,” said John Grady, research manager of security products and services for IDC, in a report the market-research firm published in March. IDC predicts that this market will continue to expand over the next four years, and, Grady added, it “believes a defense-in-depth posture with a combination of on-premise equipment and cloud-based mitigation provides the best protection against advanced application and SSL-based attacks as well as large-scale volumetric attacks.”
Infonetics Research agrees, stating in its “DDoS Prevention Appliances Report” earlier this year that global revenue grew 30 percent in 2012, for a total of $275 million. It identified the top two vendors as Arbor Networks and Radware but pointed out that Juniper Networks, with its February acquisition of Webscreen Systems, is hot on the leaders’ heels along with F5 Networks and Fortinet.
