DDoS Attacks Wreak Havok On UK Businesses, With Daily Costs Spiralling To £240k

Distributed denial of service [DDoS] attacks on UK businesses increased by 35 per cent in 2013 as over a third of companies admitted that losses stemming from DDoS attacks have escalated to an average of £240,000 per day.

Neustar’s second annual UK DDoS Attacks & Impact Report entitled ‘2014: The Danger Deepens’ reported that the scale of DDoS attacks is increasing, with a 200 per cent upsurge in attacks that affect bandwidth between 1-20 Gbps. Even larger DDoS attacks that attack bandwidth that has a magnitude of 100Gbps or more have also shown a “significant increase” in 2013.

"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," explained Rodney Joffe, senior VP and Technology Fellow at Neustar. 

Of the 331 UK companies surveyed by Neustar, 32 per cent reported estimate losses of over £240,000 per day during a DDoS outage and the amount of long-lived attacks, which are defined as lasting longer than two days, showed an upsurge of 28 per cent.

Repeat attacks have dogged many companies and figures showed that once a company has been attacked there is a 69 per cent chance there will be a repeat attack. 31 per cent of those companies were repeat attacked just once and a worrying 48 per cent were targeted between two and 10 times.

Neustar’s survey originally set out to estimate the impact that DDoS attacks have had on UK businesses, how the problems are being managed by firms and the altering of attitudes to DDoS attacks over the past 12 months.