Four Emerging Trends that Can Help You Prevent a DDoS Attack

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Even as The Global DDoS Prevention Market witnesses healthy growth, its products segment has already got an upper hand. Globally, there is an increasing trend of consolidation in Data-Centers to tackle sophisticated application-layer attacks. Where traditional solutions have failed, they are looking to invest more in services that help prevent DDoS attacks.

There’s keen interest in DDoS attacks prevention, to avoid loss of information, funds and reputation. Commonly known as smoke screening in industry circles, DDoS attacks on mobile networks and private data have resulted in huge losses for even the end-users of these networks.

Measures to curb this menace have brought an increase in expenditure on DDoS prevention. Under this growing trend, the DDoS prevention market is slated to grow at a CAGR of 19.4 percent.

Organizations across geographies are recognizing their vulnerability to DDoS attacks. With as many computers and connections distributed across locations, damage to key resources like bandwidth, processor time and configuration, can lead to significant losses.

Such threat-concerns are rapidly rising even in the SMB sector, which in turn is looking at cost-effective cloud solutions. New innovations in DDoS attacks prevention are therefore taking shape.

Technavio analysts have pointed out 4 key trends that are impacting the Global DDoS Prevention Market.

Use of DDoS Attacks as a Diversionary Tactic

Small-scale DDoS attacks are being used by Cyber criminals as a diversionary tactic to distract security and networking personnel. When these professionals are involved in mitigating such attacks, cyber criminals strike loose ends in their networks with more advanced attacks. Known to syphon large amounts of cash and critical data including intellectual property, cyber criminals are increasingly cloning private data.

To combat this menace, organizations end-up allocating all their resources; a situation they look to avoid. This in-turn is bringing urgency to invest in updated purpose-built solutions to thwart such attacks effectively.

Rising Losses due to DDoS Attacks

Losses incurred to customer organizations are increasing with a multitude of organizations reporting damages to the tune of US$10,000 per hour. Costs to organizations have increased steadily because DDoS attacks now accompany other sophisticated attacks, where the sole objective is to steal critical information such as intellectual property.

Customer organizations are now required to not just appraise products and services, but to also constantly evaluate network and security end-points to close as many gaps as possible.

Application Layer Attacks

Application layer attacks are different from volumetric attacks in the sense that they consume less bandwidth. They are performed in a more stealthy fashion, attacking specific applications such as HTTP, DNS, and SMTP.

The attacks are of four types:

  • Request-flooding attacks (sends high rates of application layer requests) 
  • Asymmetric attacks (sends high workload requests in normal rates) 
  • Repeated one-shot attacks (a combination of request-flooding and asymmetric attacks)
  • Application-exploit attacks (target applications through inherent vulnerabilities)

Application layer attacks signal the increasing sophistication in DDoS attacks, which are expected to grow in multitude in the coming years.

Security Vulnerabilities in Cloud Environment

As customer organizations opt for cloud prevention services, the multitenant nature of the cloud is seen to attract malicious attackers. Whether it is the hacker who targets critical information, or the hacker whose main target is to put the service on hold, a cloud customer is a relatively easy target. Data center operators are the most affected, with enterprise customers coming second.

These organizations in fact experience daily attacks and this has greatly increased the need for enhanced protection. This surely is a promising trend for vendors in the DDos Attacks Prevention Market.