Arbor Networks has released the findings of its first annual enterprise threat landscape report.
Focused on the key cyber and distributed denial-of-service threats facing enterprise organisations, the report examines the trends in rising attacks against these businesses and the power of DDoS to significantly interrupt an organisation’s presence and services, causing significant reputational and financial damage.
The biggest concern emerging from the report is 63% citing DDoS threat to Internet service availability as a top priority.
50% of respondents experiences DDoS attacks against their infrastructure last year with 25% encountering DDoS attacks against customer partner-facing services last year. 35% of data centre operators saw their firewalls/IPS impacted by DDoS in 2012
A worrying result was that 63% of enterprises allow personal devices on their networks, but a quarter of those do not monitor these devices.
In light of recent high-profile assaults such as operation Ababil against a number of US financial institutions and the Spamhaus attack earlier this year, the largest DDoS attack to date at over 300Gbps, these threats are requiring ever-increasing attention from the C-suite.
Darren Anstee, Arbor Networks solutions architect team manager, said: "A broad range of organisations are now being targeted, with motivations ranging from financial fraud right the way through to ideological hacktivism. And, the impact of a successful attack can be significant both financially and from a reputation perspective if customer data is stolen or customer facing services become unavailable.
"This report should make organisations ask questions about whether their current security posture is appropriate, and it provides enterprise IT security and C-level executives with an insight into the threats that are out there and what can be done to mitigate them," he added.
