Distributed denial of service attacks have become a favorite tactic of cyber criminals, extortionists and protesters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In fact, a Ponemon Institute analysis concluded DDoS attacks accounted for 18 percent of data center outages in 2013 and that was up from 2 percent back in 2010. The current estimated average cost of such an outage is approaching $900,000 per incident. Another 2014 study placed the cost of a DDoS attack on an organization at $40,000 an hour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While the cost for the attacked organization is rising, attackers are seeing their costs drop. Did you know that not long ago one organization advertised on the black market to perform a DDoS attack for a 24-hour period on a website of your choosing would only cost $500? In October 2014 a report by cybersecurity provider Symantec disclosed that attackers can rent DDoS attack services for as little as $5. This type of cyberattack is difficult to stop and for the most part leaves a path of disruption that is difficult to trace back to the individuals responsible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The main target<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n One study found the U.S. is the primary target of DDoS attacks coming in with 81 percent of total number of DDoS attacks identified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some have come to believe that DDoS attacks are old and outdated; but in actuality, they are gaining in popularity. \u00a0The use of DDoS attacks has doubled year after year and have begun flooding Web applications with useless online transactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The average DDoS attack now leverages between 50 Gbps and 100 Gbps to flood their targets and make the websites unavailable for legitimate use. Some attacks have reached nearly 400 Gbps and lasted over half a day. The problem has risen to the point where the FBI issues warnings about ransomware and criminals demanding payment in bitcoin or face a DDOS campaign. The International Business Time also recently reported some cyber criminals now demand very high ransoms from banks if they want to avoid experiencing a DDoS attack. One source in the Middle East went as far as to call DDoS attacks as one of today’s most dangerous security threats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More devices, more problems<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Akamai recently found that DDoS attacks have been doubling for the past three quarters. The report said that in the past year, DDoS action has increased by 132 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stop for a moment and consider the not so distant future with the Internet of Things. Current projections indicate that there will likely be between 50 billion to 200 billion devices in use by 2020. These devices have very low processing power, but many do not have firewalls or antivirus protection. This makes them extremely valuable to compromise. Think about all of the useless traffic that could be generated that would flow across the Internet backbone and back to the IoT data collection source.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Worse yet, think about how hard it would be to remediate all of those IoT devices after they are in the field and operating. Let’s take it one step further: Could connected cars be used as an operational node in a botnet being used in a DDoS attack?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stop for just a moment and consider that only 45 percent of organizations asked stated that they had put in place DDoS defenses. To put that in context, a whopping 36 percent said they were not confident in the measures they put in place to thwart and mitigate DDoS attacks. So, do you have DDoS defenses that have been tested and a cyber incident response plan that has been practiced? If not, based on this information perhaps you should get started immediately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The number of distributed denial of service attacks has more than doubled in just a year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":39694,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":10,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[10,16],"tags":[],"coauthors":[858,888],"class_list":["post-16750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cyber","category-it-networks"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"NFZL37HTIFBWBMSCBDTTRRLJUU","arc_canonical_url":"\/2015\/08\/28\/an-old-fashioned-ddos-is-the-favored-tactic-of-many-cyberattackers\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n