Finance, telco and IT sectors were top targets for DDoS attacks in 2015

A new study conducted by Kasperky Labs and B2B International, has revealed that around one in four IT, telecommunication, and financial services companies have experienced a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack over the last year.
Almost half of the financial businesses understand that they are a prime target for these attacks while IT and telecommunication companies do not believe they are as at risk. This is dangerous because it could leave them more vulnerable to potential attacks.
DDoS attacks have grown in popularity amongst cyber criminals and have been used to extort money, disrupt a site's operation, and serve as a distraction whilst another cyber attack is occurring. 75 per cent of businesses that were victims of DDoS attacks said that the timing of attacks corresponded with other security incidents.
Evgeny Vigovsky, Head of Kaspersky DDoS Protection, Kaspersky Lab said: "As the recent DDoS attacks on telecoms companies and banks reveal, businesses in these sectors represent prime targets for DDoS attackers. In some cases, DDoS attacks are a smokescreen for the cyber-theft or result in exorbitant ransom demands. That is why vulnerable sectors need to be extra-vigilant about security and be ready to deal with DDoS attacks. They need to build their understanding of the threat and choose the best protection against it. The days of DDoS attacks being an operational frustration that just resulted in some downtime are long over."
However the study showed that many companies are unaware of the threat of DDoS attacks and are unclear about how to stop them or contain them. Only 52 per cent of the companies surveyed felt that they had the necessary information regarding the intricacies of these attacks. This could be troublesome as DDoS attacks have become a popular tool among cyber criminals due to their difficulty to trace and ease to implement.
Kaspersky Labs does offer DDoS protection to its customers and is able to reroute traffic allowing junk requests to be filtered out while legitimate traffic is forwarded to the site. This allows users to continue using the site or service safely even while an attack is taking place.

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via DDoS Attacks