Ransomware attacks may be grabbing the headlines, but there’s more for businesses to worry about. According to a new report from cybersecurity firm Radware, so-called hit-and-run distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are causing havoc for businesses left and right.
Unlike traditional DDoS attacks, in which an attacker uses a botnet to send huge amounts of traffic to a server for as long as possible, hit-and-run attackers use repeated short bursts of high-volume attacks in order to avoid being deflected by anti-DDoS solutions.
These attacks are “particularly aggressive” in their attack size and frequency (the number of bursts per unit of time), the company claims, with one victim suffering multiple consistent 80Gbps bursts lasting two to three minutes and being repeated every four minutes.
While companies in finance, healthcare and technology industries were the ones to be attacked most frequently, the retail industry repelled the greatest volume.
On average, businesses are each blocking almost 5,000 malicious events per month. During Q2 2021, the average number of malicious events blocked rose by 30 percent, while volume grew by more than 40 percent year-on-year.