Growing Need for DDoS Protection

Although Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have become a mainstay of hackers’ arsenals, their profile has changed considerably in the past year or so. DDoS attacks are an even greater threat to companies that conduct business online or have significant investments in their online brand and reputation. DDoS attacks are larger, stealthier, more targeted, and more sophisticated than ever.

• 74 percent of 400 IT decision makers in the United States and Europe reported experiencing one or more DDoS attacks in the past year—even though they had some basic measures in place to prevent such an attack.¹
• 31 percent of these attacks resulted in service disruption. In some cases, millions of dollars per hour were lost while the organization fought to restore its online services.²

While many organizations are increasingly concerned about the DDoS threat, few organizations have specific DDoS protection tools in place. Those that do address DDoS often rely on approaches that lack the capacity and agility to mitigate attacks rapidly—and preferably before they reach the network. Traditional measures, such as over-provisioning of bandwidth, are insufficient to mitigate today’s diverse, large-scale attacks. More than half of the respondents to the Forrester survey reported that their Internet Service Providers’ (ISPs’) services had been disrupted by DDoS attacks in the past 12 months.¹

At the most basic level, successful DDoS mitigation involves:

• Knowing which signals trigger alerts.
• Watching for those signals 24/7.
• Having the technology capability and capacity to identify and deflect attacks.
• Allowing legitimate traffic to reach its destination.
• Possessing the skills and experience to address issues appropriately in real time.