Zayo’s annual Distributed Denial of Service Insights Report found a significant increase in the intensity of DDoS attacks last year.
'Unprotected organisations' paid out an average of £4,700 per minute of each attack, totalling a £325,000 average cost to businesses.
This was driven by a steep rise in duration of DDoS attacks, which rose by more than 400 per cent from Q1 to Q4.
Telcos accounted for about 40 per cent of the total attack volume, with almost 13,000 attacks in the second half of the year, followed by retail, healthcare, government and educational institutions.
DDoS attacks in the first half of 2023 increased by 200 per cent compared to the whole of 2022. Despite the number of attacks dropping off in the second half of the year, volumetric attacks were replaced by multi-vector attacks, which cause more widespread damage by targeting individual IP addresses, email systems, databases or web browsers. They are also much harder to detect.
"What we’re seeing is that cybercrime is only getting savvier," said Anna Claiborne, senior VP of network connectivity at Zayo. "AI is presenting itself as a double-edged sword in this space.
"On one side of the blade, criminals are using AI to increase the sophistication of attacks and circumvent traditional defence mechanisms; on the other, mitigation platforms are using AI to dynamically identify and defend against new and emerging threats. As DDoS remains a profitable model for cybercriminals, attacks will continue to be a brutal inevitability for businesses. But luckily, DDoS protection is also rising to the occasion."
Eric O’Neill, national security strategist at Carbon Black, said, "Most people on the internet aren’t plotting a DDoS attack, but the internet is a big place and dark web crime is the fastest growing business on earth. We’re in an attacker’s market and they are leveraging sophisticated technologies and cutting-edge techniques to innovate the way they deceive, disrupt and destroy our most critical data. To stop the attackers from gaining the upper hand, we need DDoS protection that is as easy and effective as turning on a switch."