According to over 760 managers, directors, CSOs, CIOs, CTOs, and others in the security and IT fields, during the summer of 2015, the general DDoS trend observed was that from isolated events, companies are now dealing with DDoS attacks on a more consistent and continuous basis.
50% of surveyed companies experienced a DDoS attack
The survey shows that half of the participant companies, in both North America and EMEA, experienced DDoS attacks during the 2014 and 2015. Worrisome is the fact that 83% were attacked more than once, and 54% were hit more than 6 times.
Additionally, as we were previously reporting in September, the trend of using DDoS attacks to
hide more serious breaches was also observed by Neustar, who reported that 36% of survey respondents said that they've uncovered malware and virus infections after each DDoS attack, and one in four companies also reported data breaches or exfiltration of funds from their accounts.
Most of the times the company's IT team got to the bottom of the attack (80%), but in some cases, the attack was reported first by customers (18%) and business partners (13%).
Most DDoS attacks were of low capacity
Most attacks were slow and small, between 1.0 and 4.9 Gbps (17%), while attacks of over 100 Gbps were recorded by only 2% of the surveyed managers.
In fact, 56% of the DDoS attacks lasted less than a day, while only 1% were continuous attacks that prolonged for over a week.
Neustar also observed another worrying trend, 60% of the surveyed businesses still using network and IT equipment not purposely-built to mitigate DDoS attacks.
This and much more other information can be found in the
full Neustar report, which is available for download on their website.
