Seattle Business 4/2/2018
By: Patrick Knorr
According to Kaspersky Lab’s annual IT Security Risks Survey1, in 2017 33% of businesses reported Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, up from just 17% in 2016. Of those companies that were victimized, more than half also reported the DDoS attacks were used as a smokescreen to hide other types of cybercrime like malware, data leaks, and financial theft.
DDoS attacks work by flooding an online service or website with unsolicited and overwhelming traffic. Under the strain of such a demand, network performance can slow to a crawl or even shut down entirely. Companies experiencing “slow internet days” can discover they’re in the grips of a DDoS attack which is slowly eating away at their systems and costing them lost revenue, employee downtime, and potentially affecting hardware.
But aren’t these attacks just focused on enterprise-level organizations? Unfortunately, no. All businesses could be at risk. From the same Kaspersky Lab survey, of those companies affected by the DDoS attacks, 53% were classified as small (fewer than 50 employees) or mid-size (50-999 employees) firms.
With regard to larger companies, according to Forrester research2, only “58% of global security decision makers at enterprise firms reported that they are highly concerned about an IT outage affecting customer-facing systems.”
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1 Kaspersky Lab Research Shows DDoS Devastation on Organizations Continues to Climb
2 Forrester Data Global Business Technographics Security Survey, 2017