Deloitte predicts 'distributed denial of service' cyber-attacks to enter the terabit era this year

Phill Everson, Deloitte UK’s head of cyber risk services, said:

“A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack aims to make a website or connected device inaccessible. DDoS attacks are the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of fake customers converging on a traditional shop at the same time. The shop struggles to identify genuine customers and quickly becomes overwhelmed. The consequence could see an online commerce site temporarily unable to transact, or a government site not able to process tax returns, for example.

“DDoS attacks will not only scale up this year to a terabit per second in some instances, but also increase in frequency to a total of 10 million attacks. The volume and scale of such breaches would challenge the defences of organisations, regardless of size.

“This escalation in the DDoS threat is largely due to the growing number of vulnerable IoT devices and online availability of IOT-focused malware (both of which allow relatively unskilled attackers to hijack IoT devices and use them to launch attacks), as well as access to ever higher bandwidth speeds.

“Businesses of all sizes should acknowledge the growing DDoS threat and consider how best to handle attacks of these magnitudes.”

End

Notes to editors

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