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Are Traditional Firewalls Enough to Protect Companies from DDoS Attacks?

May 18, 2012

By

Brittany Walters-Bearden
MSP News™ Contributor

Many business firms in the United States still use conventional firewalls to protect themselves against viruses, Trojan horses, and outside attacks. With the new influx of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, many people have been asking, are the traditional firewalls enough to protect companies?

Information giant, Neustar, conducted a survey of 1,000 American IT (Information Technology) companies to determine the level of protection that they had against DDoS attacks. DDoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile Web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root name servers. The findings were unbelievable:

• Only 3 percent of the companies are utilizing software to prevent DDoS attacks.
• 25 percent of the companies say that they have NO software in place for these threats
• 11 percent of the companies are using intrusion detection/prevention systems software , even though it is considered unreliable by industry standards.

A denial of service attack is one in which a computer or network resource is made unavailable to its intended users, meaning that anyone who is trying to make a purchase or pay a bill during the attack will be denied service and the company in question will lose money. When a DDoS attack occurs, a third of the companies said they last for one or more days while 11 percent of those attacked said that when they experienced an attack, it lasted for more than a week. More than 60 percent of the companies said that attacks cost them approximately $10,000 an hour until repairs could be done and 13 percent of those reported that their losses were closer to $100,000 an hour.

Three of the most vulnerable industries that have been affected by DDoS attacks are finance, the retail industry, and the travel industry. The fact that many of these companies remain vulnerable to these attacks is unsettling. Neustar’s survey will undoubtedly serve as a wakeup call for companies across America, reminding them to be extra-vigilant against these attacks, as the financial losses for failing to be prepared for them are tremendous.

Edited by Brooke Neuman