A third of UK organisations (33%) say that DDoS attacks are a key concern for them as these attacks are being used as an effective tool to breach security defences, cause disruption and bring down systems for whole working days, a survey from BT found.
Despite the growing worry, less than one in 10 IT decision makers in the UK (8%) say that their organisations have sufficient resources to thwart these attacks while about 49% of them said that they have a response plan ready to counter them.
The report added that DDoS attacks can cause major disruption, take down an organisation’s website, overwhelm a data centre or make networks unusable, and the increasing complexity of the attacks is making it difficult for the organisations to defend themselves.
During the past year, about 41% of the organisations globally were hit by DDoS attacks with 78% of them targeted twice or more in the year.
With the increasing number of organisations being targeted, the worry of cyber attacks is greater among global organisations with 58% of them saying that DDoS attacks are a key concern.
BT Security president Mark Hughes said DDoS attacks have evolved significantly in the last few years and are now a legitimate business concern.
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"They can have a damaging effect on revenues and send an organisation into full crisis mode. Reputations, revenue and customer confidence are on the line following a DDoS attack, not to mention the upfront time and cost that it takes an organisation to recover following an attack," Hughes said.
"Finance, e-commerce companies and retailers in particular suffer when their websites or businesses are targeted. Organisations need a higher level security solution to protect not only the network infrastructure but the devices that initially provide protection."
The report has found that organisations take about 12 hours to fully recover from such attacks while in the UK about 58% of the IT decision makers said that DDoS attacks have brought down their systems for more than six hours – almost a full working day.
Following the DDoS attacks, customer complaints and queries surge 36% when their network systems are paralysed.
BT prepared the report by polling opinions of IT managers from organisations in 11 countries around the world.
