Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Are you protected ?
A Denial of Service (DoS) attack involves saturating the target machine with external communications requests, so much so that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered essentially unavailable. Such attacks usually lead to a server overload. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by either forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consuming its resources so that it can no longer provide its intended service or obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately. This sort of attack can be very disruptive and costly.
A survey recently published by Neustar Ltd compares the DoS attacks in specific business sectors in the UK & USA.
Some of the key findings are:
- 22% of the UK companies surveyed had experienced a DDos attack in 2012
- The Telecoms, Retail & Internet/Commerce sectors were the worst trade sectors affected
- 40% of attacks take between 2 to 5 people to mitigate the attack, with The IT department & Customer Services bearing the brunt of the mitigation costs
- 22% of attacks in the UK last over a week
- 20% of the responding UK organisations had no DDos Protection in place, only 5% had specific DDos Hardware installed
