Four out of every ten global organisations were hit by Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks last year, claims a new BT research report.
According to the research report, 41 percent of organisations around the world admitted facing a DDoS attack in the last twelve months, with 78 percent of them reporting two or more attacks during the same period.
DDoS attacks can cause damaging effect to the organisations’ reputation, revenue and consumer confidence by making their websites unavailable or their networks unusable. In case of DDoS attacks, compromised systems overload the bandwidth or resources of the targeted web server with traffic, ultimately affecting the website’s availability.
The research conducted by Vanson Bourne in May 2014, interviewed 640 medium to large scale IT organisations across 11 countries and regions.
The research found that around 58 percent of global organisations see DDoS attacks as a key concern, with more than one-third of UK organisations agreeing with them.
Despite the alarming increase in the number of DDoS attacks, it is quite surprising to note that only half of UK organisations (49 percent) have admitted to having a response plan in place, while only one in 10 UK decision makers said they have sufficient resources in place to counteract such an attack.
The report further said that organisations, faced with a DDoS attack, takes around 12 hours to fully recover from it. Around 58 percent of IT decision makers in the UK admitted DDoS attacks had brought down their servers for over six hours.