More than half (53 percent) of service providers indicated they are seeing more than 21 DDoS attacks per month, up from 44 percent last year.

New research from Arbor Networks’ 12th Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report (WISR) focuses on the operational challenges internet operators face daily from network-based threats and the strategies adopted to address and mitigate them.

The survey polled 356 respondents that included services providers, hosting, mobile, enterprise and other types of network operators around the world.

Since the WISR began in 2005, DDoS attack size has grown 7900 percent. Attacks increased by 60 percent in 2016.

Twenty-one percent of data centre respondents saw more than 50 attacks per month, as opposed to only eight percent last year. More than 10 attacks per month were experienced by 45 percent of enterprise, government and education (EGE) respondents.

Two-thirds (67 percent) of service providers and 40 percent of EGE respondents reported seeing multi-vector attacks on their networks.

Sixty-one percent of data centre operators reported attacks totally saturating data centre bandwidth. A quarter of data centre and cloud providers saw the cost of a major DDoS attack rise above £79,000, and five percent cited costs of over £793,000. Forty-one percent of EGE organisations reported reportedDDoS attacks exceeding their total internet capacity.

Nearly 55 percent of EGE respondents now carry out DDoS defence simulations, with about 40 percent carrying them out at least on a quarterly basis.

Data centre and cloud provider respondents using firewalls for DDoS defence has fallen from 71 percent to 40 percent.

“The survey respondents have grown accustomed to a constantly evolving threat environment with steady increases in attack size and complexity over the past decade. However, IoT botnets are a game changer because of the numbers involved. There are billions of these devices deployed, and they are being easily weaponised to launch massive attacks. Increasing concern over the threat environment is reflected in the survey results, which show significant improvements in the deployment of best practice technologies and response processes,” said Darren Anstee, chief security technologist at Arbor Networks.

Source: https://www.scmagazineuk.com/53-of-service-providers-are-seeing-over-21-ddos-attacks-per-month/article/633962/