While banks continue to be among the biggest victims of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, a new Verizon (NYSE: VZ) 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 vertical sectors.
"2012 saw a dramatic increase in the number of distributed-denial-of-service attacks throughout the world, and we saw a dramatic increase against banks in the United States," said Dave Ostertag, a senior analyst with Verizon's risk team, in an interview with Gov Info Security. "But we have seen increases in other industries. Most DDoS attacks we've seen in the last year were activism-based."
Ostertag added that even though data is not breached during these attacks, they do pose a risk of their information being exposed. In particular, the attacks have resulted in fraud issues for regional banks.
The telco's sixth Data Breach Investigations Report cited 621 confirmed data breaches in addition to more than 47,000 reported security incidents that were investigated by Verizon and 18 of its global partners, including law enforcement agencies.
A number of high-profile DDoS attacks have taken place over the past year. One of the latest took place in March, which, while directed against anti-spam organization Spamhaus, slowed Internet speeds for some regions of the globe.
Verizon's findings are much in line with other studies on DDoS attacks.
A separate report by Prolexic Technologies revealed that between Q4 2012 and Q1 2013, attack traffic spiked 718 percent--the highest volume that the DDoS protection provider has ever recorded in a single quarter. In addition to increased botnet resources, they are attempting to overwhelm infrastructure components, like routers, with infrastructure attacks climbing 26.75 percent in Q1.
For more:
- here's the study (reg req)
- Gov Info Security has this article
Editor's Corner: Spamhaus DDoS was just a warning shot
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