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Homeland Security Wants To End The Scourge Of DDoS Attacks

In 2017, Homeland Security has as much to do with securing digital borders as it does geographical ones. One push the DHS is leading to make cyberspace safe for Americans is the DDoSD project. The first four letters — DDoS — should be familiar enough by now. We’ve numerous distributed denial-of-service attacks in the recent past, with targets ranging from African wireless carriers to cybercrime bloggers to one of the largest DNS providers in the world. It’s the last letter in DDoSD that makes all the difference. That D stands for defense, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Security Division (CSD) is funding multiple systems that have the potential to stem the rising tide of DDoS attacks. In a post published last week, the DHS stated that its goal is to “build effective and easily implemented network defenses and promote adoption of best practices by the private sector.” With the right tools and the public’s cooperation, the DHS hopes “to bring about an end to the scourge of DDoS attacks.” The DHS post points to a best practices document that was shared by The Internet Society way back in the year 2000. That document describes “a simple, effective, and straightforward method for using[…]traffic filtering to prohibit DoS attacks.” It’s a good starting point, but the DHS post notes that no one defense system can repel every attack. That’s why the DHS has multiple teams working on multiple solutions. One is a peer-to-peer system that would allow Internet providers around the globe to collaborate on the automated detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks. Others are focused on neutralizing high-powered attacks. There’s still work to do, but it’s great to see the DHS leading a coordinated effort because something needs to be done. Last year, DDoS protection provider Imperva Incapsula reported helping its customers fend off an average of 445 attacks every week. Their intensity increased dramatically, too, up from around 200Gbps in 2015 to 470Gbps in 2016. Add in a report from Verizon that named the three biggest targets of DDoS attacks as cloud and IT service providers (49% of all attacks), the public sector (32%), and banks (9%), and it becomes very clear why we need the DDoSD project to succeed. Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2017/02/20/homeland-security-wants-to-end-the-scourge-of-ddos-attacks/#527bd1556c0f

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Homeland Security Wants To End The Scourge Of DDoS Attacks

74 Percent of Companies that Suffer a Data Breach Don’t Know How It Happened

And just two thirds of IT pros say their current IT security budget is sufficient, a recent survey found. According to the results of a recent survey [PDF] of 250 IT professionals, 34 percent of companies in the U.S. were breached in the past year, and 74 percent of the victims don’t know how it happened. The survey, conducted by iSense Solutions for Bitdefender, also found that two thirds of companies would pay an average of $124,000 to avoid public shaming after a breach, while 14 percent would pay more than $500,000. One third of CIOs say their job has become more important in their company’s hierarchy, and another third say their job has been completely transformed in the past few years. And while nine in 10 IT decision makers see IT security as a top priority for their companies, only two thirds say their IT security budget is suifficient — the remainder say they would need an increase of 34 percent on average to deliver efficient security policies. Cloud security spending increased in the past year at 48 percent of companies, while the budget for other security activities remained the same. On average, respondents say only 64 percent of cyber attacks can be stopped, detected or prevented with their current resources. Separately, a survey of 403 IT security professionals in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Europe found that only three percent of organizations have the technology in place and only 10 percent have the skills in place to address today’s leading attack types. The survey, conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Tripwire, also found that just 44 percent of organizations have the skills, and 43 percent have the technology, to address ransomware attacks effectively. “Most organizations can reasonably handle one or two key threats, but the reality is they need to be able to defend against them all,” Tripwire senior director of IT security and risk strategy Tim Erlin said in a statement. “As part of the study, we asked respondents which attack types have the potential to do the greatest amount of damage to their organization. While ransomware was cited as the top threat, all organizations were extremely concerned about phishing, insider threats, vulnerability exploitation and DDoS attacks.” Respondents felt most confident in their skills to handle phishing (68 percent) and DDoS attacks (60 percent), but less confident in their abilities to deal with insider threats (48 percent) and vulnerability exploitations (45 percent). Similarly, respondents felt more confident in the technology they have in place to address phishing (56 percent) and DDoS attacks (63 percent), but less confident in the technology to address insider threats (41 percent) and vulnerabilities (40 percent). A separate survey of 5,000 U.S. consumers by Kaspersky Lab and HackerOne found that 22 percent of respondents are more likely to make a purchase if they know a company hired hackers to help boost security. Knowing what they do about their own company’s cyber security practices, just 36 percent of respondents said they would choose to be a customer of their own employer. Almost two in five U.S. adults don’t expect companies to pay a ransom if hit by ransomware. When asked what types of data they would expect a company to pay a ransom for, 43 percent expect companies to do so for employee Social Security numbers, followed by customer banking details (40 percent) and employee banking details (39 percent). Source: http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/74-percent-of-companies-that-suffer-a-data-breach-dont-know-how-it-happened.html

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74 Percent of Companies that Suffer a Data Breach Don’t Know How It Happened

Blame the US, not China, for the recent surge in massive cyberattacks

The internet’s new scourge is hugely damaging global attacks that harness armies of routers, cameras, and other connected gadgets—the so-called Internet of Things (IoT)—to direct floods of traffic that can take down swaths of the network. The blame so far has largely fallen on the Chinese manufacturers who churn out devices with shoddy security on the cheap. But all those devices have to be plugged in somewhere for them to used maliciously. And American consumers are increasingly the ones plugging them in. Nearly a quarter of the internet addresses behind these distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks are located in the United States, newresearch from network services firm Akamai has found. Some 180,000 US IP addresses took part in DDoS attacks in the last quarter of 2016, it found—more than four times as many as addresses originating in China. Akamai’s findings are particularly notable because the armies of hacked devices that carry out DDoS attacks—such as those controlled by the Mirai malware—don’t bother covering their tracks. That means the IP addresses are far more likely to genuinely correspond to a location within a certain country, the report’s authors write. The findings also end an era of Chinese dominance in DDoS attacks. Over the previous year, China has accounted for the highest proportion of IP addresses taking part in such attacks globally. Now the US is the clear leader, accounting for 24% of such addresses. The UK and Germany are a distant second and third. (To be clear, though, wherever the attacking devices’ IP addresses are, the person controlling them could be located anywhere.) The huge number of devices taking part in DDoS attacks in the US means regulation there, and in Europe, could stem the flood of damaging traffic. Of course, IoT regulation is a thorny issue—essentially, no US federal agency really wants to take the problem on—and there remain technical questions over how to actually go about blocking the attacks. Still, it’s a lot clearer now that simply pointing the finger at China isn’t enough. Source: https://qz.com/912419/akamai-akam-report-a-quarter-of-ddos-ip-addresses-are-now-from-the-us/

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Blame the US, not China, for the recent surge in massive cyberattacks

Majority of DDoS Attacks in October-December 2016 Conducted From Germany, UK, US

According to reports, United States, the United Kingdom and Germany became the top three source countries for DDoS attacks in October-December 2016. MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The United States, the United Kingdom and Germany became the top three source countries for DDoS attacks in October-December 2016, an Internet company dubbed Akamai said in report Wednesday, adding that the overall number of attacks in 2016 increased by 4 percent compared to previous year. “The top three source countries for DDoS attacks were the U.S. (24%), the U.K. (10%), and Germany (7%). In the past year, China dominated the top 10 list of source countries. In Q4 2016, China dropped to the fourth position overall, with 6% of traffic,” the State of the Internet / Security Report said. Russia became the fifth country in the list, with 4.4 percent of attacks. “The average number of DDoS attacks remained steady this quarter [October-December 2016] at 30 per target, indicating that after the first attack, an organization has a high likelihood of experiencing another,” the report said. The study notes that the number of IP addresses, used for DDoS attacks, significantly increased in the last quarter of 2016. The report also provides data regarding attacks in January- September 2016, with China, the United States, Turkey and the United Kingdom being the top source countries for attacks. Source: https://sputniknews.com/world/201702151050711562-ddos-atacks-internet/

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Majority of DDoS Attacks in October-December 2016 Conducted From Germany, UK, US

University suffers DDoS attack after it’s schooled by own IoT devices

Infected vending machines and light bulbs teach establishment a lesson. A PLACE WHERE late stage teenagers go to drink and make arses of themselves has fallen victim to a denial of service (DDoS) attack of, essentially, it’s own making. Yeah, we are talking about a university. We do not know what university it is, but Verizon’s breach report for 2016 tells us that the mysterious educational establishment, probably in the US, was taken to its knees by a DDoS attack that was brought about by its own bloody Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It’s kinda like that Mirai thing, but on a much smaller, and more personally embarrassingly scale. We like to imagine that a connected toaster and a connected fridge had a fallout and that everything when bits up. According to Bleeping Computer, which has had a cheeky look at the Verizon report, it was a bit more pedestrian than that. “The DDoS attack was caused by an unnamed IoT malware strain that connected to the university’s smart devices, changed their default password, and then launched brute-force attacks to guess the admin credentials of nearby devices,” Verizon says as it explained that something fishy went down. “Hacked devices would start an abnormally high level of DNS lookups that flooded the university’s DNS server, which in turn resulted in the server dropping many DNS requests, including legitimate student traffic. The university’s IT team said that many of these rogue DNS requests were related to seafood-related domains.” The university has placed all IoT devices, such as light bulbs and vending machines, on its separate subnet, or perhaps in a bin. The security industry reckons that this is a signal of the kind of unprotected troubles to come. Naturally. “On the surface this appears to be more of a prank than a sophisticated denial of service attack. However, proving that largescale IoT takeovers are possible should be a wakeup call to those who manage networks rife with unsecure IoT devices,” said Stephen Gates, chief research intelligence analyst at NSFOCUS by way of introduction. “Municipal, Industrial, Commercial, and now Educational infrastructures are becoming more and more vulnerable, because organisations often carelessly deploy IoT without understanding the ramifications of weak IoT security. “In this case the damage appears to be limited, and only inconvenienced users on a campus network. Do the same to a transportation system, a chemical plant, a hospital complex, an E911 system, or an ISP, and the damage could be much, much greater.” Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3004579/university-suffers-ddos-attack-after-its-schooled-by-own-iot-devices#

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University suffers DDoS attack after it’s schooled by own IoT devices

What retailers need to know about cybersecurity

Annual global costs tied to destruction of data, intellectual property theft, lost productivity and fraud are on pace to reach $6 trillion by 2021. Here’s how retailers can avoid becoming a statistic. Cybercrime is big business — and retailers are squarely in the crosshairs. Cybercrime — the catch-all term applied to an ever-expanding range of digital assaults from malware to theft of personal data to distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS, i.e. coordinated traffic onslaughts on servers, systems or networks designed to make the target difficult or impossible for legitimate users to access) — is rapidly growing more common, more dangerous and more complex. Service interruptions from DDoS attacks alone surged 162% in 2016. Cybercrime is also growing more lucrative: Nearly 90% of all cyberattacks now involve financial or espionage motivations, according to the Verizon 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report. Corresponding annual global costs related to damage and destruction of data, intellectual property theft, lost productivity and fraud are on pace to grow from $3 trillion in 2015 to $6 trillion by 2021. While the second half of 2016 brought to light three of the largest data breaches ever recorded (two raids on web platform Yahoo that impacted at least 1.5 billion accounts combined; the other affecting about 412 million accounts across social network Adult Friend Finder), retailers in fact experience the most cyberattacks of any industry sector — about three times as many as the previous top target, the financial industry — information and communications technology firm NPD Group reports. The list of victims is long and ignominious, and includes Target, Home Depot, Eddie Bauer and Vera Bradley. The question isn’t if and when yet another retailer will fall victim in the weeks and months ahead, experts say, but simply where the wheel of misfortune will land next. “You’ll never be able to put up perimeters and defenses to stop the behavior of malicious attackers. Organizations need to accept the fact that if they’re not breached today, they likely will be breached at some point in the point in the future,” Paul Truitt, vice president of cybersecurity services at managed network solutions firm SageNet, told Retail Dive. “Getting ahead of the criminal and stopping them before they do what they’re going to do is a losing battle. But acting quickly and having the processes in place to respond what it does happen is achievable, and if every organization had that in place, we could significantly shorten the average data breach notification and identification, and also create much less juicy targets for the bad guys.” Threat assessment Retailers are like catnip to cybercriminals because of the wealth of customer data stored on their networks. While hijacking credit card account data has long been the primary objective — about 42 million Target shoppers had their credit or debit information stolen when the retailer was breached in late 2013 — thieves are also keen to acquire personal data like names, mailing addresses, phone numbers and email addresses. “There’s a lot of data around shopping habits and purchasing patterns now being stored by retailers — information they never had before,” Truitt said. “If you’re tying a loyalty program to a mobile payment program, those payment programs are bringing more sensitive data into the retail organization than in the past, and that’s what criminals are looking for.” The threat isn’t lost on retailers. Fully 100% of retail executives surveyed for the 2016 BDO Retail RiskFactor Report cited data privacy and security breaches as major business risks, up from 55% in 2011 and 26% in 2007. But according to Truitt, relatively few retailers have advanced their cybersecurity efforts beyond implementing the basic safeguards necessary to meet payment card industry (PCI) security standards. “[Cybersecurity] varies by retailer,” he said. “We still see a lot of retail organizations putting their eggs into the PCI basket. The feeling is that they’ve secured their organizations by meeting PCI compliance requirements, but in reality, the vectors of attack are outside what PCI mandates needs to be done. When you think about security programs focusing only on PCI at best, we’re going to see a lot of data continue to be exposed.” The media fallout and brand damage associated with past merchant data breaches (not to mention the legal costs and governmental penalties, which can run into the millions) are driving retailer cybersecurity awareness and investment, says Robert Horn, associate director at insurance and risk management solutions provider Crystal & Co. “Retailers have been forced to increase their cybersecurity because of the breaches we’ve had in the last several years. Your public perception takes a hit, there’s customer churn, and the fines and penalties are increasing,” Horn told Retail Dive. “Cybersecurity is getting much more attention from the C-suite. Before, just the IT director was involved. Now you’ve got legal, you’ve got corporate governance, you’ve got the CFOs and the CEOs wanting to know what’s going on.” But knowing what’s going on is easier said than done, because cybercrime evolves with mind-boggling speed. What began two decades ago with relatively simple viruses and website attacks hatched by malcontents seeking internet notoriety has rapidly mutated into discrete, laser-targeted and highly sophisticated offensives masterminded by thieves, hackers and extortionists motivated by financial gain. “There isn’t a single organization that can say they’re 100% secure,” Maarten Van Horenbeeck, vice president of security engineering at content delivery network Fastly, told Retail Dive. “But there are organizations that have the maturity and the smart people to say, ‘We understand what is happening, and we believe we know how to defend against it and how to protect our customer data.’” Personnel and protection Understanding what’s happening begins with identifying potential cracks in your armor. Verizon found that most attacks exploit known vulnerabilities that businesses failed to patch, despite software providers making patches available months or even years prior to the breach taking place. In fact, the top 10 known vulnerabilities account for about 85% of all successful exploits each year. Avoiding disaster also depends on recognizing the warning signs and criminal patterns: 95% of breaches and 86% of security incidents fall into nine established exploit patterns. Building a more secure retail business begins with smart personnel decisions. “The single biggest thing an organization can do today is hire the right people. There are so many technologies out there,” Van Horenbeeck said. “It’s like putting together a puzzle of the correct pieces to make sure you’re defending yourself against attack. You need to hire the right people who understand that puzzle, and who know how to make the organization as safe as possible.” Perhaps no retail security solution has generated more headlines and discussion than the fall 2015 shift from traditional “swipe-and-signature” credit and debit cards to chip-enabled EMV cards, a move designed in part to better protect consumers from escalating transaction fraud. While EMV (which takes its name from Europay, MasterCard and Visa, the three companies that created its chip-integrated standard) effectively blocks card cloning and other commonplace criminal tactics, its security innovations are limited to transactions where the physical card is present, meaning many cyberthieves are shifting their focus from brick-and-mortar stores to the web. That means retailers dependent on e-commerce must embrace software solutions including end-to-end software encryption, a method of secure communication that prevents hackers, internet service providers or any other third party from accessing, stealing or damaging cardholder data or other information during its transfer from one system or device to another. “Organizations that have made investments in EMV but did not invest in end-to-end encryption have a risk misperception,” said SageNet’s Truitt. “They believe they are secure, but they’ve only accomplished authentication of credit cards. They’ve accomplished nothing related to the security of the actual transaction. Many retailers that don’t have security teams internally, or that outsource their security fully and don’t have anyone with that knowledge in-house, has misinformed themselves about what EMV is doing. We’re going to see more organizations put fewer security controls in place and reduce some spend, because they think they have put the right security in place. But they’ve left themselves more exposed than they used to be.” Beyond the basics, retailers should also consider adopting data loss prevention solutions to help monitor, manage and protect confidential data wherever it’s stored or used, as well as emerging tools like advanced behavioral authentication (methodologies that monitor headquarters and store employees’ attributes and behaviors to prevent imposters from accessing infrastructure and data), data-mining and visualization techniques, and security response automation. There’s no time to waste. Experts anticipate cybercrime to continue to increase in the months to come, and warn that emerging technologies like the Internet of Things and advances in artificial intelligence present a multitude of new opportunities for attack. Only the strong will survive. “It’s hard to predict what new threats will come about,” said Horn. “[Security] all comes down to putting resources into cybersecurity teams. A bad breach can put you out of business.” Source: http://www.retaildive.com/news/what-retailers-need-to-know-about-cybersecurity/435567/

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What retailers need to know about cybersecurity

Five Taiwan brokerages report cyber attack threats, regulator says

Taiwan is investigating an unprecedented case of threats made to five brokerages by an alleged cyber-group seeking payment to avert an attack that could crash their websites, an investigator and the securities regulator said on Monday. Rick Wang, an official with Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC), said each brokerage had received an email setting a deadline for the transfer of funds to avoid a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Such attacks, among the most common kind on the internet, overload a website until it is forced to inhibit access or go offline. They have become common tools for cyber criminals trying to cripple businesses and organizations with significant online activities. “We have never seen this on such a scale – five companies hit at one time with the same threat,” said Wang, adding that the regulator usually sees single instances of cyber-crime. FireEye, a cybersecurity consultancy, said the attacks were similar to a wave of threatened denial of service attacks by a previously unidentified group that first appeared in Europe last month. The Taiwan attacks do not pose a threat to the island’s broader trading and financial system, Wang said, but he added that the regulator had asked all securities firms to step up defensive measures. One threat recipient, Masterlink Securities Corp, said its website had come under attack, but it had recovered and operations were normal. “The emails were sent under the name of the ‘Armada Collective’,” said Chiu Shao-chou, an official of the internet cybercrime division of Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau, the government’s top investigation body. The Armada Collective, a hacking extortion group, has been linked to financial blackmail heists elsewhere. But Chiu said the group has been put under watch and Taiwan investigators were still looking into the original source of the emails. The email demanded payment in web-based digital currency bitcoin equivalent to about T$300,000 ($9,731.41), Taiwan media said. None of the securities companies made any payments, Chiu said. Another brokerage firm, Capital Securities Corp, was hit on Monday by a DDoS attack lasting 20 minutes before its system recovered, the regulator said, but it did not link the latest case to the threatening emails. (This version of the story corrects sixth paragraph to show the attacks were similar to, not necessarily part of, a wave of attacks in Europe last month) Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-cyber-idUSKBN15L128

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Five Taiwan brokerages report cyber attack threats, regulator says

DDoS attack on Dyn costly for company: claim

A distributed denial of service attack on Dynamic Network Services, otherwise known as Dyn, in October 2016, led to the company losing a considerable amount of business, according to data from the security services company BitSight. A report at the Security Ledger website said while Internet users endured short-term pain because they were cut off from popular websites during the attack, the company, Dyn, lost the business of about 8% of the domains — about 14,500 — it was hosting shortly thereafter. This figure was based on statistics in a talk given on 24 January by Dan Dahlberg, a research scientist at BitSight Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dyn is based in Manchester, New Hampshire. It was recently bought by Oracle Corporation. During the outage, Dyn was targeted by hackers who are said to have used digital video recorders and security cameras which were compromised by malware known as Mirai and used to form a massive botnet. The first attack, on 21 October 2016 US time, began at 7.10am EDT (10.10pm AEDT) and, once this was resolved by Dyn, further waves caused disruptions throughout the day. While major US websites like Twitter, Spotify, Netflix and Paypal were disrupted, the application performance management software company Dynatrace said that Australian websites were affected as well. Among the Australian sites that took a hit, Dynatrace listed AAMI, ANZ, BankWest, Coles, The Daily Telegraph, Dan Murphy’s, ebay, HSBC, The Herald Sun, NAB, 9News, The Age, Ticketmaster, The Australian, Woolworths, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Westpac. BitSight provides security rating services for companies. It analysed 178,000 domains that were hosted on Dyn’s managed DNS infrastructure before and after the attacks; of these 145,000 used Dyn exclusively, while the remaining 33,000 used Dyn and others too. After the attack, according to Dahlberg, 139,000 of the 145,000 domains managed exclusively by Dyn continued to use its services, a loss of 4% or 6000 domains. Among domains that used Dyn and other providers as well, there was a loss of 8000 domains, or 24%. Security Ledger said it had tried to get a comment from Dyn but was refused one. It is not clear whether any of the 14,500 domains that were found not to be using Dyn’s services in the aftermath of the attack returned to the provider. Source: http://www.itwire.com/security/76717-ddos-attack-on-dyn-costly-for-company-claim.html

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DDoS attack on Dyn costly for company: claim

SQL Sequel: Sequel Slammer worm resurfaces after more than a decade

SQL Slammer, a fast-moving worm that generated a wave of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in 2013, mysteriously resumed high levels of activity in late 2016 after more than a decade of dormancy. According to a company blog post Thursday, Check Point Software Technologies detected a “massive” surge in SQL Slammer attacks between Nov. 28 and Dec. 4, 2016. “What we’ve been seeing is not the actual worm, but its attempts to reach more servers,” said Maya Horowitz, group manager, threat Intelligence at Check Point, in an email interview with SC Media. “Therefore we cannot know for sure if any changes have been [made to] the worm or the vulnerabilities it exploits.” When it first surfaced in 2003, the worm managed to infect tens of thousands of servers and routers in a matter of minutes by exploiting a buffer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2002-0649) in Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or Microsoft SQL Server Data Engine 2000 – both of which are no longer supported. These infected, exploited machines would then bombard ransom IP addresses with an enormous stream of malicious packets that would infect other vulnerable systems, while simultaneously overloading Internet-based network devices with traffic. Microsoft patched this vulnerability in Jan. 2003 and over the years has issued multiple new versions of the affected products. This makes these latest attacks ever stranger, because unless the worm has evolved in some way, it is hard to imagine that users remain susceptible to this threat. “One theory to why it’s attempting to make a comeback is that cybercriminals are seeking easy ways to cause DoS and slow down the entire Internet, just like with the recent Mirai botnet,” said Horowitz. “And reusing old malware is the easiest way.” Source:https://www.scmagazine.com/sql-sequel-sequel-slammer-worm-resurfaces-after-more-than-a-decade/article/636156/

39% of businesses not ready to protect themselves against DDoS

Companies are not ready to protect themselves against DDoS, with four in ten (39%) businesses unclear about the most effective protection strategy to combat this type of attack, according to research from Kaspersky Lab. A lack of knowledge and protection is putting businesses at risk of grinding to a halt. DDoS attacks can quickly incapacitate a targeted business’s workflow, bringing business-critical processes to a stop. However, the research found that nearly a fifth (16%) of businesses are not protected from DDoS attacks at all, and half (49%) rely on built-in hardware for protection. This is not effective against the increasing number of large-scale attacks and ‘smart’ DDoS attacks which are hard to filter with standard methods. Large-scale cyberattacks are now commonplace, such as the recent attack on telecommunications provider StarHub, which faced a high-profile DDoS attack in October last year. Hackers are also showing a preference for DDoS attacks, with the proliferation of IoT devices today. As IoT devices have weak security protocols, they are easy targets for hackers to launch DDoS attacks from. As IoT devices are forecasted to hit 21 billion in 2020, each potential entry point into an organisation increases vulnerability to DDoS attacks. Many businesses are in fact aware that DDoS is a threat to them – of those that have anti-DDoS protection in place, a third (33%) said this was because risk assessments had identified DDoS as a potential problem, and one in five (18%) said they have been attacked in the past. For some, compliance, rather than awareness of the security threat, is the main driver, with almost half (43%) saying regulation is the reason they protect themselves. The problem for businesses is that, in many cases, they may assume they’re already protected. Almost half (40%) of the organizations surveyed fail to put measures in place because they think their Internet service provider will provide protection, and one in three (30%) think data center or infrastructure partners will protect them. This is also not always effective, because these organizations mostly protect businesses from large-scale or standard attacks, while ‘smart’ attacks, such as those using encryption or imitating user behavior, require an expert approach. Moreover, the survey found that a third (30%) fail to take action because they think they are unlikely to be targeted by DDoS attacks. Surprisingly, one in ten (12%) even admit to thinking that a small amount of downtime due to DDoS would not cause a major issue for the company. The reality is that any company can be targeted because such attacks are easy for cybercriminals to launch. What’s more, the potential cost to a victim can reach millions. “As we’ve seen with the recent attacks, DDoS is extremely disruptive, and on the rise,” says Kirill Ilganaev, Head of Kaspersky DDoS Protection at Kaspersky Lab. “When hackers launch a DDoS attack, the damage can be devastating for the business that’s being targeted because it disables a company’s online presence. As a result business workflow comes to a halt, mission-critical processes cannot be completed and reputations can be ruined. Online services and IT infrastructure are just too important to leave unguarded. That’s why specialized DDoS protection solution should be considered an essential part of any effective protection strategy in business today.” Source: http://www.networksasia.net/article/39-businesses-not-ready-protect-themselves-against-ddos.1486046674

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39% of businesses not ready to protect themselves against DDoS