The True Costs Of DDoS Business Attacks

DDoS attacks have become much more than just a nuisance in the past decade.

That’s one of the results published in the 10th annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security report, written by Arbor Networks.

In the report it says that distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) have transformed from “mostly a nuisance and nothing more than an independent event” a decade ago, to “a very serious threat to business continuity and the bottom-line”.

Kaspersky Labs claims a DDoS attack could cost a company as much as $444,000 (£293,000), IBTimes reports.

According to the study, 61 per cent of DDoS victims temporarily lost access to critical business information, while 38 per cent of companies were unable to carry out their core business.

“A successful DDoS attack can damage business-critical services, leading to serious consequences for the company,” said Eugene Vigovsky from Kaspersky Labs.

“For example, the recent attacks on Scandinavian banks caused a few days of disruption to online services and also interrupted the processing of bank card transactions, a frequent problem in cases like this.

“That’s why companies must consider DDoS protection as an integral part of their overall IT security policy. It’s just as important as protecting against malware, targeted attacks, data leaks and the like,” he said.

In the past 10 years, DDoS attacks have grown in size by a factor of 50. The largest ever DDoS attack, peaking at 400Gbps, occured on 11 February 2014.

A hacker group called Lizard Squad has recently been filling up headlines by taking down numerous sites with DDoS attacks, including Sony and Microsoft’s online gaming platforms.