UK Firms Hit By More Frequent And Costly DDoS Attacks

One third of UK companies surveyed by Neustar say they were hit by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks last year, that resulted in estimated losses of £240,000 per day. The majority of firms said they were ill-equipped to deal with such attacks.

The real time information and analytics firm surveyed 331 firms across a range of industries, including financial services, retail, public sector, utilities and Internet services, for its second annual UK DDoS Attacks and Impact Report and discovered that such attack were becoming more frequent.

There was a 200 percent increase in attacks affecting bandwidth between 1 and 20 Gbps, while attacks on 100Gbps are also becoming more frequent. Once a company is attacked, there is a 69 percent chance they will be targeted again, with 48 percent subjected between two and ten times.

DDoS attacks

DDoS attacks are also lasting longer and requiring more resources to solve, according to the report, which states that 28 percent last for up to two days and says the number of attacks requiring more than six people to mitigate rose to 39 percent and those requiring more than ten people doubled to 24 percent.

Multiple business units are affected by attacks, but public facing services, such as call centres, customer support and marketing suffer more than most, sustaining 40 percent of all associated costs caused by a DDoS.

The report also highlights a growing trend in smokescreen DDoS attacks. These are DDoS designed to distract IT and security teams while cybercriminals steal information or to mask malware of viruses. One such incident saw criminals use a DDoS to steal bank customer information and dran $9 million from ATMs in just 48 hours.

“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,” says Rodney Joffe, Senior Vice President and Technology Fellow at Neustar. “Even with proper mitigations in place, the attack caused an upstream ripple. It is a constantly changing threat landscape.”

Earlier this year, one of the biggest DDoS attacks ever to hit Europe was detected by CloudFlare, which said it was probably close to 400Gbps in power, while video games publisher Blizzard was one of the more recent high profile victims of such an attack.

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