New Kaspersky Labs research notes that the financial impact of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack continues to rise, and is now more than $120K for SMBs and more than $2M for enterprise organizations. A Corero Network Security executive notes that these costs can climb far higher, based on recent research and given upcoming regulatory changes such as GDPR. Andrew Lloyd, President at Corero Network Security commented below.
Andrew Lloyd, President at Corero Network Security:
“Rather than focusing solely on average loss/cost values of a DDoS attack, it’s helpful to think about what a DDoS attack might cost an organisation for every minute that it goes unmitigated. Especially for revenue sensitive customers who have websites where the online “cash register” runs at hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of US dollars every minute, and for session-sensitive services such as online banking and gaming.
“Also, with the introduction in May 2018 across all 28 EU member states of punitive legislation such as GDPR and NIS, the cost of a successful DDoS cyber-attack could be set for a major uptick with fines of up to €20 million.
“We agree with Kaspersky that it is the reputational damage which, sooner rather than later, is likely to have the largest negative impact. Corero research shows that the vast majority of DDoS attacks are sub-saturation in scale and short in duration. Traditional DDoS detection and mitigation technologies that rely on manual intervention are poorly equipped to react to these swift modern attacks. Those businesses who have failed to upgrade their DDoS defences expose themselves to the quadruple whammy of revenue losses, recovery costs, regulatory fines and reputational damage.”
