DDoS attack volume has remained consistently high and these attacks cause real damage to organizations, according to research published by Neustar.
The global research also affirms the prevalent use of DDoS attacks to distract as “smokescreens” in concert with other malicious activities that result in additional compromise, such as viruses and ransomware.
“Distributed denial-of-service attacks are no longer isolated events limited to large, highly visible, targets. Sophisticated attacks hit companies of all sizes, in all industries,” IDC research director for security products Rob Ayoub said.
Neustar collected responses from more than 1,000 information security professionals, including CISOs, CSOs and CTOs across North America, EMEA and APAC, to determine how DDoS attacks are impacting their organization and how they are mitigating the threat.
The report highlights that the overwhelming majority of surveyed organizations in APAC (77%) suffered a DDoS attack. Eighty-five percent of attacked organizations were attacked more than once and 45% were attacked six or more times.
The majority of organizations that suffered a DDoS attack (53%) also experienced some form of additional compromise. In APAC, 48% of breached organizations discovered a virus, malware was activated at 37% of breached organizations, and ransomware was encountered at 16% of breached organizations.
It can take hours to detect and mitigate a DDoS attack at significant cost to the organization. Eighty-one percent of organizations in APAC took an hour or more to detect a DDoS attack and 72% took an additional hour or more to respond to the attack.
Globally, forty-nine percent of surveyed organizations would lose $100,000 or more per hour of downtime during these attacks.
The overwhelming majority of respondents (76%) are investing more in DDoS protection than they were a year ago. The majority of respondents (53%) are using traditional firewalls, 47% are using a cloud service provider and 36% are using an on-premise DDoS appliance combined with a DDoS mitigation service (hybrid solution).
“As proof of the increasing threat and destructive nature of DDoS attacks, the industry has recently seen an incredibly complex, hacked IoT device-driven DDoS attack that surpassed 620 Gbps, lasted for multiple days, and crippled a high visibility website,” said Tom Pageler, Chief Security and Risk Officer of Neustar.
“Organizations across Asia Pacific are becoming more digitalized and as a result risk being exposed to increasingly complex and relentless attacks, said Robin Schmitt, Head of APAC for Security at Neustar. “IT and business leaders need to realize the potential damage that an attack can cause, and apply adequate security measures that will protect their company from a DDoS attacks.”