1 in 3 Cloud Companies Face DDoS Attacks
Neustar recently published a report that covers the rise in popularity of DDoS attacks against cloud companies. Neustar’s report was titled “2014: The Danger Deepens – Neustar Annual DDoS Attacks & Impact Report.” The report suggests that up to a third of cloud businesses cloud be faced with a DDoS attack.
The report gives us a glimpse at what some cloud companies must deal with from an information security and availability standpoint. In English, a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack floods a host with packets thus making the host seem unavailable for normal end users.
Neustar’s report provides us with some interesting statistics. For example, out of the 450 companies surveyed, 47% of the companies feel as if the threat of a DDoS attack has increased while 44% feel as if the risk is the same as the previous year. This equates to 91% of survey participants feeling as if the DDoS attacks are just as prevalent as they were in the past or more prevalent today.
DDoS attacks have certainly matured since the technique became popular a couple decades ago. Neustar has coined the term “Smokescreening” where attackers will launch a massive DDoS attack to keep security professionals busy while using malware to extract the data they desire. Neustar’s report mentions, “Larger attacks are more common, but most attacks are still less than 1 Gbps. Companies report a greater financial risk during a DDoS outage; however, most still rely on traditional defenses like firewalls, not purpose-built solutions like DDoS mitigation hardware or cloud services.”
Neustar’s report is filled with eye opening information that should help increase the awareness of DDoS attacks. For example, Neustar noted that between 2012 and 2013, a 71% increase in DDoS attacks occurred. 77.45% of DDoS attacks lasted less than 24 hours.
If you feel as if your cloud company is at risk of a DDoS attack, We have previously written at length about Cloud-based DDoS Deflection Solutions that will help protect the reputation and uptime of your website, app or public cloud.
