Growing Risks of Distributed denial of service (DDoS) Attacks

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) is a form of cyber-attack in which multiple systems are used to interrupt normal traffic of a targeted network or server and makes it impossible to deliver a service. DDoS attacks had grown at a CAGR of more than 65% over past 5 years and is still expected to grow for next few years. Number of DDoS attacks which were observed were higher in Europe and APAC as compared to other regions.

DDoS Attacks can be majorly divided into 3 categories

Volumetric attacks: In this type of attacks all the available bandwidth of network is consumed by bogus traffic which makes users unavailable to access desired applications

Connection state attacks: Network devices or systems can track the connection states, in this type of attack there are many connections which unable new user to make connection.

Application-layer attacks: in this type of attacks application layer of an organization is targeted and application servers are flooded with multiple requests which consumes all available resources.

Impact of DDoS

  • DDoS attacks are now becoming more frequent and bigger menace due to the emergence of IoT botnets which is a major concern for various enterprises, governments and institutions.
  • There was a significant increase in the frequency of volumetric attacks, the percentage of attacks increased approximately to 75% in 2017, which was around 72% in 2016.
  • The IT/Cloud/SaaS industry was most frequently targeted industry representing more than 50% of mitigation activity and financial industry was second largest in experiencing DDoS attacks, represents more than 30% of mitigation activity.
  • DDoS attacks targets various network infrastructures and websites to utilize the available bandwidth and interrupts access for customers.
  • This can damage the brand and reputation and can result disappointment for customers which can impact end-users experience.
  • DDoS attacks can decrease productivity and can bring daily business operations to halt which can result in loss of revenue.
  • These attacks have major impact on online service providers as their business and profits completely depends on website availability.
  • DDoS attacks continue to be a major challenge for all types of network operators.


DDoS is a type of cybercrime in which hackers’ overload network resources with traffic originated from multiple hosts which prevent users to access network resources. The most common form of attacks are volumetric attacks. DDoS attacks targets organizations application servers, web servers, firewalls or routers to bring services down. Traditional techniques such as signature based detection techniques, DDoS mitigation solutions are unable to detect sophisticated DDoS attacks. As DDoS attacks are expected to show significant growth for next few years, organizations must adopt artificial intelligence based security systems which can detect threats and DDoS attacks before they appear and network analytics technology to get real time visibility of traffic around network to resolve network issues faster and identify cyber threats.

– Sonam Chawla 
Research Analyst,
Infoholic Research