Incident Response, TDR, Threat Management

Market for DDoS prevention to hit $870 million

A new study has found that the market for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and DoS attack mitigation solutions is projected to grow 18.2 percent between 2012 and 2017, hitting $870 million in spending.

Market intelligence firm IDC last week released its “Worldwide DDoS Prevention Products and Services 2013-2017 Forecast” study.

The report predicted "volumetric" attacks will continue to be the most prevalent type of DDoS attack. According to John Grady, a research manager for IDC's security products program, the company defines volumetric attacks as commonly used tactics by attackers to overwhelm IT infrastructures by flooding them with bandwidth.

“Volumetric attacks have been most common for the last decade and the massive attack that we saw in the last week or so was volumetric based,” Grady told SCMagazine.com, referring to the wide-ranging DDoS attack that impacted internet users worldwide last week.

In the incident, CyberBunker, a Netherlands-based web host, was accused of launching DDoS attacks against Spamhaus, a nonprofit anti-spam group that blacklisted it – a reprisal that eventually grew to become the largest attack of its kind, encompassing 300 gigabytes per second of traffic from saboteurs.

Aside from the volumetric-style attacks that use traditional means for attacking sites, Grady said application-layer attacks, which consume less bandwidth, or ones that leverage encrypted traffic are becoming more common.

“[These] attacks are harder to detect because they better emulate legitimate traffic,” he said.

He said that the Spamhaus-CyberBunker incident also added weight to notion that anyone can be the target of relatively easy-to-launch DDoS attacks.

A highly publicized example of this is the on-and-off attacks against U.S. bank sites since the fall.

And in December, Prolexic, a DDoS mitigation firm, released a report announcing an 88 percent increase in the total number of DDoS attacks in the third quarter of 2012 compared to the same period in 2011.

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