DoS attacks expose enterprise infrastructure vulnerabilities

Lurking in the shadows for nearly a decade, DoS and DDoS attacks are making a resurgence. Several high-profile assaults on the world’s leading financial firms and other industries have recently been experienced. And attacks are increasing in frequency, data volumes and application specificity.

According to new research from IDC, these attacks render servers and/or network resources unavailable by overwhelming them with traffic. The evolution from hacktivism to financial gain to disguising more targeted attacks is evidence of a re-emerging trend that exploits the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of some of the world’s largest and most powerful organizations.

In 2012, there was a sharp increase in the frequency, bandwidth volume, and applications orientation of these attacks. “As these attacks surged in prevalence and sophistication, organizations were often caught unaware. Embedded capabilities were quickly overwhelmed and outages were readily apparent on the Web. This is driving the need for proactive solutions to protect customer’s infrastructure from current and future attacks,” said Christian A, Christiansen, VP, Security Products & Services research at IDC.

As detailed in the IDC forecast, the worldwide market for DDoS prevention solutions (including products and services) will grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.2% from 2012 through 2017 and reach $870 million.

Volumetric attacks will remain the predominant type of DDoS attacks throughout the forecast period. These simple yet devastating attacks are exceedingly effective due to the relative ease with which botnets can send a bandwidth flood that can cripple most enterprise infrastructures.

Despite volumetric-based attacks remaining most popular, more advanced hybrid attacks that include application layer and encrypted traffic will grow. This will drive growth in the on-premise equipment market throughout the forecast period.

“With the number of high-profile attacks steadily increasing, the market for DDoS prevention solutions will surge,” said John Grady, Research Manager for IDC’s Security Products program. “A defense-in-depth posture with a combination of on-premise equipment and cloud-based mitigation provides the best protection against advanced application and SSL-based attacks as well as large-scale volumetric attacks.”

Additional findings from IDC’s research include:

• Expansion of cloud services and mobile networks creates additional targets for DDoS attacks.
• Providers of anti-DDoS products and services continue to expand partnering relationships to address the evolving nature of attacks.
• Firewalls, intrusion protection, and other devices may mitigate very low-level attacks, but large volumetric attacks easily overwhelm their capabilities and the security devices can become the attackers’ unwilling allies because they are unable to separate legitimate for illegitimate traffic.
• Customers increasingly embrace services and product-based solutions, but larger enterprises will adopt a hybrid solution that combines these solutions.