The tactics utilised by bad actors to gain access to organisations' critical data grow more sophisticated and aggressive with each passing year, making cyber security an ongoing battle. But as systems and processes continue to evolve in response to these emerging threats, it is important to not lose sight of strong cyber security fundamentals, as even the most familiar threats can still wreak havoc on your operations, profits, and reputation.
For example, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks - the practice of flooding servers with malicious traffic from multiple sources (typically bots), in order to limit their availability for legitimate traffic, or even render them completely inaccessible, remain an ongoing threat, as the following statistics demonstrate:
- DDoS attacks increased by 46% in the first half of 2024, with 445,000 attacks reported in the second quarter alone.
- In the first half of the year, the most powerful recorded attack reached 1.7Tbps. For context, an attack of 300Gbps is often enough to render a server inoperable.
- An attack can cause serious operational disruptions in as little as ten minutes, although the longest attack reported in the first half of 2024 lasted sixteen hours.
Far from being a simple nuisance, such attacks have the potential to render key services completely unavailable to customers, leading to irreparable financial and reputational damage. Well-publicised examples include:
- The 2016 attacks by the Mirai botnet, which utilised a range of IoT devices to mount an attack of unprecedented scale, with targets including the popular Krebs on Security blog and European hosting provider OVH.
- A second large-scale DDoS attack on Github took place in 2018, clocking in at 1.35Tbps for more than twenty minutes, taking advantage of the Memcached caching system rather than utilising a network of bots.
- The 2020 attack on AWS reached 2.3Tbps over the course of three days, utilising vulnerable third-party servers to amplify the attack - a strategy that has since been utilised by other cyber criminals.
- A 2022 HTTPS-based attack on a customer utilising Google Cloud Armour peaked at 46 million requests per second for around sixty-nine minutes - the largest Layer 7 attack on record.
- February 2023 saw the largest DDoS attack on record, with 71 million requests per second targeting popular gaming platforms, cryptocurrency companies, hosting providers, and various Cloud platforms.
With this in mind, any robust cyber security ecosystem should incorporate a dedicated DDoS Protection solution. Far from being a 'nice to have' it's the 'cherry on top' that makes any IT 'sundae' complete, whatever other services and platforms you are currently utilising.
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EXPO.e Networks includes a world-class DDoS Protection solution as part of our rich selection of IT 'flavours', ready to stack on top of your other solutions, whether that includes Cloud, Connectivity, or Unified Communications - as part of a fully integrated Cyber Security ecosystem.
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