According to Kaspersky’s Global IT Security Risks Survey 2017, DDoS attacks have increased in frequency in 2017, with 33 per cent of organisations having faced one this year compared to just 17 per cent in 2016. While DDoS attacks have been previously used to disable the operations of a target, the driving motivation to use it now is the theft of corporate data. Stephanie Weagle, VP at Corero Network Security commented below.
Stephanie Weagle, VP at Corero Network Security:
“Kaspersky’s research emphasises how any organisation, regardless of its size, type or location, can be seriously impacted by denial of service attacks. The aftermath of these attacks can leave a company scrambling to regain customer trust and rectify brand damage, in addition to the financial impact. And whatever the motivation or intended outcome – corporate data theft, retaliation, monetary gain – it is clear that organizations must be prepared to fight back.
“As this research shows, DDoS attacks are often used as a springboard for more damaging cyber threats or data theft, and are therefore something that all security professionals should be alert to. 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.
“The only proper defence against today’s sophisticated attacks is to use an automatic, real-time DDoS mitigation system, which can monitor and mitigate DDoS traffic automatically to eliminate service outages and allow security personnel to focus on uncovering any subsequent malicious activity, such as data breaches.”
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