DDoS Attacks Are on the Rise. Is Your Network Prepared?

“DDoS prevention appliances are the first line of defense against brute-force attacks like those we saw aimed at US financial institutions last September, and most service providers and large enterprises are investing heavily in them,” said Jeff Wilson, principal security analyst at Infonetics, in a July press release. “With the number, size and coverage of DDoS attacks on the rise, we expect revenue for DDoS prevention solutions to grow in the healthy double digits through 2014.”

The report indicates that DDoS protection for mobile networks will also rise—a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25 percent between 2012 and 2017—thanks to massive increases in their capacity and their new role as highly visible targets for attacks.

“Many vendors are reporting sharp growth in direct sales to enterprises even though conventional wisdom says that large-enterprise customers are looking at cloud-based solutions for DDoS mitigation,” Wilson said. “There are many enterprise environments where data simply cannot leave privately owned networks and data centers to be scrubbed in the cloud, mostly for compliance reasons.”

That sentiment is echoed by Data Foundry, one of the latest service providers to adopt Radware’s DDoS protection solution.

“With the ever-increasing frequency of DDoS attacks, our customers across all vertical markets have asked for a solution to help them mitigate these attacks,” said Edward Henigin, the company’s chief technology officer. “Our clients will benefit from far greater levels of protection that is typically offered by the rudimentary anti-DDoS offerings available from cloud-scrubbing companies and network-infrastructure vendors.”

As the amount of DDoS attacks increase, as well as the costs that businesses incur because of them, service providers and network operators are in a position to offer solid protection to their enterprise customers. Whether a company finds itself in the crosshairs of a digital flash mob or falls victim to old-fashioned organized-crime syndicates, service providers can offer solutions to stop an attack at the edge of the network before the company even knows it was a target.