14 DAY TRIAL // Around seven in ten organizations that have participated in a recent Neustar survey have revealed they were hit by DDoS attacks during 2015, a number that's much higher than many experts anticipated.
The threat of DDoS attacks has always loomed over the industry, but nobody expected it to become such a big problem in such a short time. This rising trend was noted by many security vendors in different reports, but the numbers keep on growing and growing every time.
This increasing threat of having your business operations interrupted by DDoS attacks allowed a gang of copycats imitating the infamous Armada Collective DDoS-for-Bitcoin extortion group to make over $100,000 (€90,000) just from empty threats.
Three in four companies suffered a DDoS attack in 2015
Neustar, a company that provides, among other things, DDoS protection and mitigation services, is regularly probing the market for insight on how these attacks are evolving.
Just recently, the company has also discovered that the number of DDoS bots that can pass DDoS mitigation tools has risen to 36 percent and that multi-vector DDoS attacks have become the norm.
In its most recent research, the company has surveyed 1,005 execs from various companies around the globe and discovered that 73 percent of all organizations suffered a DDoS attack in 2015, with the highest percentage of attacked companies found in the Asia-Pacific region.
Out of the 73 percent, 82 percent suffered repeated attacks, with 45 percent saying they were hit more than six times during the past year.
Crooks used DDoS attacks to mask data theft, malware installations
As a previous report from Kaspersky has shown, DDoS attacks have been used to hide more serious intrusions, a conclusion that Neustar has also reached.
The company says that 57 percent of the businesses attacked with DDoS attacks also reported a data breach, reinforcing Kaspersky's original report. Even worse, the attacks weren't merely limited to stealing data, and 45 percent of the DDoSed companies also admitted that malware was also installed on their servers following DDoS attacks.
Most of the DDoS attacks were in the 1 - 20 Gbps range, and Neustar has also noticed that eight out of ten survey respondents that deployed IoT equipment were attacked in 2015, with 43 percent of them also suffering some sort of data theft.
"Every IT professional knows it can take just one successful hack on an IoT device to access and compromise an entire network," Hank Skorny, Neustar Senior Vice President, explains. "The fact is, IoT is already here; but unfortunately its security is too often lagging behind. [...] As we continue to ingrain IoT devices into our electrical grid, hospitals, assembly lines and other essential areas of life, the stakes are too high to leave security to chance."
The 2016 Neustar DDoS Attack & Protection Report is available for download if you want a closer look at the survey's numbers.
