The average company suffers 15 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks per year, according to new research from IDG Connect, sponsored by A10 Networks, a provider of application networking and security technology.
The average attack causes 17 hours of effective downtime, including slowdowns, denied customer access or crashes, the report says.
As DDoS attacks become more popular, they are also growing harder to defend. While the average peak bandwidth of attacks was 30 to 40 gigabits per second (Gbps), 59% of the 120 organizations surveyed have experienced an attack over 40 Gbps.
A majority of respondents (77%) also expect sophisticated multi-vector attacks to pose the most dangerous type of DDoS attack in the future.
More than half of the surveyed organizations said they planned to increase their DDoS prevention budgets in the next six months. IT security teams are the most likely to lead DDoS prevention efforts (36%), followed by CSOs (26%) and CIOs (26%).
"DDoS attacks are called 'sudden death' for good reason," said Raj Jalan, CTO of A10 Networks. "If left unaddressed, the costs will include lost business, time-to-service restoration and a decline in customer satisfaction. The good news is our findings show that security teams are making DDoS prevention a top priority."
