Photo courtesy of marsmettt tallahassee on Flickr
Australia is high on the list of targets for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, an online security expert says.
A DDoS attack floods a target device or application with high volumes of irregular requests, which swamp the device or application and cause ‘denial of service’ to legitimate users. This common style of attack often targets services hosted on high-profile web servers, such as banking, credit card payment gateways and online shopping sites.
Australia has been hit particularly hard by these kinds of attacks, says Kevin Taylor, president, BT Global Services, Asia, Middle East and Africa.
BT’s recent DDoS research report found that 64% of Australian organisations were hit by DDoS attacks over the past year, which was the highest out of all 11 geographical areas measured in the report.
“DDoS attacks cause major disruption for organisations. They can wipe out an organisation’s website, overpower a datacentre or cause networks to completely grind to a halt,” Taylor said. “This can leave the organisation with downtime, lost revenue and a tarnished brand. Not only are these cyber-attacks becoming more frequent, they are becoming much more severe, making them very effective at rupturing business security.”
The best way to deal with DDoS attacks, Taylor says, is to prevent them in the first place by having adequate online protection that goes beyond Firewalls and IDP/IPS devices and ensuring employees are aware of the risks