Worldwide market for distributed denial of service (DDoS) prevention applications including products and services will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.2% from 2012 through 2017 to reach $870m, according to a new report from IDC.
IDC said that denial of service (DoS) and DDoS attacks are making a resurgence after nearly a decade.
IDC’s research found that the attacks render servers and/or network resources unavailable by overwhelming them with traffic.
According to IDC, 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 organisations.
IDC said that there was a sharp increase in the frequency, bandwidth volume, and applications orientation of these attacks in 2012.
IDC vice president of security products & services research Christian Christiansen said: "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," Christiansen added.
"This is driving the need for proactive solutions to protect customer’s infrastructure from current and future attacks."
IDC predicts that volumetric attacks will remain the predominant type of DDoS attacks throughout the forecast period.
IDC research manager for security products programme John Grady said with the number of high-profile attacks steadily increasing, the market for DDoS prevention applications will surge.
"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," Grady added.
The research also found that expansion of cloud services and mobile networks creates additional targets for DDoS attacks.
