Netscout has released its 13th Annual Arbor Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report (WISR) and claims that hackers are becoming more focused and having more successful DDOS attacks.
The report covers a wide range of topics, from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and major industry trends such as SDN/NFV and IPv6 adoption to key organisational issues such as incident response training, staffing and budgets. Its focus is on the operational challenges network operators face daily from cyberthreats and the strategies adopted to address and mitigate them.
Netscout Arbor chief technology officer Darren Anstee said that attackers focused on complexity this year, leveraging weaponisation of IoT devices while shifting away from reliance on massive attack volume to achieve their goals.
“They have been effective, and the proportion of enterprises experiencing revenue loss due to DDoS nearly doubled this year, emphasising the significance of the DDoS threat. The results of the WISR, together with our ATLAS data, demonstrate why an integrated multi-layer defence from the data centre to the cloud is required.”
More than 57 percent of enterprises and 45 percent of data centre operators saw their internet bandwidth saturated due to DDoS attacks.
There were 7.5 million DDoS attacks in 2017, according to data from NETSCOUT Arbor’s Active Threat Level Analysis System (ATLAS) infrastructure which covers approximately one-third of global internet traffic. Service provider respondents experienced more volumetric attacks while enterprises reported a 30 percent increase in stealthy application-layer attacks.
More than 59 percent of service providers and 48 percent of enterprises experienced multi-vector attacks, a 20 percent increase over last year. Multi-vector attacks combine high volume floods, application-layer attacks and TCP-state exhaustion attacks in a single sustained offensive, increasing mitigation complexity and attackers’ chances for success.
As a result, successful DDoS attacks had greater operational and financial impact. Fifty-seven percent cited reputation/brand damage as the main business impact and 48 percent with operational expenses second. Over half percent experienced a financial impact between $10,000 and $100,000, almost double the proportion from 2016 and percent of data centre operators said customer churn was a key concern following a successful attack.
