When Businesses Suffer as a Result of DDoS Attacks
It’s hardly a surprise that DDoS attacks are so common. What is surprising is that so many companies still lack adequate DDoS protection. Our own survey of IT professionals found that 58 percent are still relying on “home grown” open source solutions, or traditional security infrastructure like firewalls, to protect themselves against DDoS attacks. Just more than a third (36 percent) are adopting cloud-based solutions, including scrubbing centers, and an additional 35 percent are using on-premises DDoS mitigation products.
DDoS attacks cost time and money in the form of internal or external IT resources to bring a company’s network back online. They also lead to loss of revenue, brand reputation and customer trust. It’s quite obvious that network or website service availability is crucial to ensure customer trust and satisfaction, and vital to acquire new customers in a highly competitive market. When an end user is denied access to Internet-facing applications or if latency issues obstruct the user experience, it immediately impacts the bottom line; this is especially true in some industries such as online gaming and web hosting. In other industries, such as bio-pharma and financial services, customer trust in cybersecurity is critically important, and it can be harder to measure those intangible costs.
Smart CISO’s Utilize Real-time DDoS Defense
DDoS attacks are becoming more sophisticated, deceptive and frequent, and finding ways to bypass traditional security measures. In many cases, rather than trying to cause an outage, attackers seek to merely distract security staff with short, sub-saturating DDoS ‘noise’, which allows them to map the network for vulnerabilities, install malware, or access sensitive information. These increased threats mean that defending against DDoS attacks is a top security priority for any organization that relies on the Internet to conduct business.