Cybersecurity

While banks continue to be among the biggest victims of distributed denial of service attacks, a new Verizon report said that every industry sector is vulnerable. In its 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report, the service provider wrote that DDoS events rose sharply in 2012 and are appearing in companies in various verticals.

A series of submarine cable outages in the past two weeks caused widespread disruptions of Internet service in the EMEA and Asia regions, leading to increased attention on the importance of alternate routes and better interconnectivity. For land-based Internet exchanges, the timing couldn't be better, according to Harald Summa, CEO of Germany-based DE-CIX Management GmbH.

Buyers prowling the global telecom marketplace in 2012 saw plenty more deals being made, but at much lower valuations, an IDC report says. More than 3,800 deals were made last year, a 14.2 percent rise over 2011 M&A activity.

In today's spotlight, The New York Times takes a look at how cable set-tops may have been used by a hackers last month to help execute a denial of service (DDoS) attack on European anti-spam organization Spamhaus.