Corero Network Security Survey Finds Degradation of Customer Confidence and Lost Revenues are the Most Damaging Ramifications of DDoS Attacks
Study Highlights the Effects of DDoS Attacks and How Businesses are Addressing the Threat Today
July 14, 2015
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PRESS RELEASE
HUDSON, Mass.-- Corero Network Security (LSE: CNS), a leading provider of First Line of Defense® security solutions against DDoS attacks, today announced the results of a survey conducted at the U.S. RSA Conference 2015 and Infosecurity Europe. Based on the responses, more than half of IT security professionals (52 percent) said loss of customer trust and confidence were the most damaging consequences of DDoS attacks for their businesses.
In addition, a fifth of respondents (22 percent) indicated that DDoS attacks have directly impacted their bottom line – disrupting service availability and impeding revenue-generating activity.
“An organization’s ability to maintain service availability in the wake of a DDoS attack is paramount in maintaining customers, as well as winning over new customers in a highly competitive market,” said Dave Larson, CTO and Vice President, Product at Corero Network Security. “When an end user is denied access to Internet-facing applications or if latency issues obstruct the user experience, the bottom line is immediately impacted.”
One-fifth of respondents cited a virus or malware infection as the most damaging consequence of a DDoS attack, and 11 percent indicated that data theft or intellectual property loss as a result of a DDoS event is of highest concern.
“DDoS attacks are often used as a distraction technique for ulterior motives. They’re not always intended for denying service, but rather as a means of obfuscation, intended to degrade security defenses, overwhelm logging tools and distract IT teams while various forms of malware sneak by,” Larson continued.
Nearly half of those surveyed admitted to responding reactively to DDoS attacks. When asked how they knew that they suffered a DDoS attack, 21 percent cited customer complaints of a service issue as the indicator of an attack, while 14 percent said the indicator was infrastructure outages (e.g. when their firewalls went down), and another 14 percent said application failures, such as websites outages, alerted them to the DDoS event. In contrast, less than half of respondents (46 percent) were able to spot the problem in advance by noticing high bandwidth spikes, an early sign of an imminent attack, by using other network security tools.