Cyber attacks, particularly denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, are reaching new highs and in 2013, there were 32% more than in the prior year. Although more complicated hacks are still occurring and causing massive amounts of damage to companies, many hackers have flocked towards DDoS as a surefire way to knock a site offline and cause damage without much effort.
Security firm Prolexic released a new report this month detailing the increase in cyber attacks from 2012 to 2013. Earlier reports from late 2013 add important information to the topic of cyber attacks, particularly as we begin to rely on the internet for more important tasks like banking.
Just one DDoS outage results in an average of $630,000 in damage and for every minute or hour that a site is offline, that number continues to rise.
Even though many websites and hosting services now attempt to mitigate DDoS attacks with a variety of services, they have yet to get ahead of the hackers.
Depending on the situation, these cyber attacks can be used to cripple an entire nation or they can target just one large organization. Hacking groups usually take responsibility for the attacks but a large percentage which come from China are not always tied to a group.
Just during the past week alone there have been numerous cyber attacks, many of which are related to the current situation in the Ukraine. News site Russia Today (RT) has been met with criticism regarding its reporting on the issue, resulting in hackers breaking into RT’s site and replacing all instances of Russia with “nazi.”
For every hack like the one we saw with RT, there seems to be a dozen DDoS attacks. In trhe case of many large, international companies, it has gotten to the point that DDoS mitigation is something that should simply be included in the annual budget.
While the “good guys” are continuing to pump out new anti-DDoS services, the increase in cyber attacks during 2013 shows that the battle is far from over.
Summary: Cyber attacks saw a 32% increase in 2013, and during the past week alone there have been numerous DDoS and defacing missions that have resulted in significant monetary damages.
Image Credit: nationalgeographic