DDoS attacks: A third of UK companies estimate losses of over £240,000 per day

Public-facing areas like call centres, customer services and marketing absorb over 40 per cent of DDoS-attack-related costs

A third of UK companies estimate losses of more than £240,000 per day as a result of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, a survey by analytics provider Neustar has found.

In its 2014: The Danger Deepens study, Neustar surveyed 331 companies in the UK, across a range of industries including financial services, technology, retail, public sector, healthcare, energy, utilities, telecommunications, e-commerce, internet services and media.

The survey found that 32 per cent of companies estimate losses of over £240,000 per day during a DDoS outage. And public-facing areas like call centres, customer services and marketing have to pay the price, as they absorb over 40 per cent of DDoS-attack-related costs.

The number of UK companies hit by DDoS attacks in 2013 was 35 per cent than in 2012, the study found, and in 2013 much of these were more persistent attacks, with 28 per cent of them lasting for up to two days. Furthermore, larger DDoS attacks are becoming more frequent, with a 200 per cent increase in attacks affecting bandwidth between 1-20Gbps, as well as an increase in attacks on bandwidth with a magnitude of 100Gbps or more.

Once attacked, Neustar found that there was a 69 per cent chance of a repeat attack; 31 per cent of the 331 companies were DDoS attacked just once, and over 48 per cent were targeted two to 10 times.

In 2013, attacks requiring more than six people to mitigate them rose to 39 per cent compared to 25 per cent in 2012 - a 56 per cent increase. And DDoS mitigation requiring more than 10 people doubled, from 12 per cent in 2012 to nearly 24 per cent in 2013.

Neustar's senior vice president, Rodney Joffe, warned enterprises that DDoS attacks were evolving in complex and dangerous ways.

"Organisations must remain constantly vigilant and abreast of the latest threats. As an example, Neustar's UltraDNS network suffered an attack just last week peaking at over 250Gbps - a massive attack by industry standards. Even with proper mitigations in place, the attack caused an upstream ripple. It is a constantly changing threat landscape," he said.

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