Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

  1. Home
  2. Networking
  3. Verisign-studies-externally-managed-dns-improves-uptime-ddos-hits-two-thirds-us
  4. Page
  5. Verisign Studies: Externally Managed DNS Improves Uptime; DDoS Hits Two-Thirds Of U.S. Organizations: Page 2 of 3
Networking

Verisign Studies: Externally Managed DNS Improves Uptime; DDoS Hits Two-Thirds Of U.S. Organizations: Page 2 of 3

Organizations that outsource DNS management to specialized service providers experience half the downtime of those that manage DNS internally or rely on their ISPs, according to a study commissioned by Verisign. And, in another report, a Verisign survey showed that nearly two-thirds of the responding companies experienced distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, although more than 80% of them have some sort of DDoS protection, either on premises or through a service provider.
May 10, 2011

DDoS is a major security problem, according to the 225 U.S. IT executives and decision makers surveyed in March. Four out of five were extremely or very concerned about DDoS attacks, and about two-thirds expect the frequency and strength of attacks to increase or stay the same in the next two years.

A majority (63%) of the respondents say they had experienced at least one DDoS attack in the past year, and one in nine say their organizations had suffered six or more attacks. Nearly half of those attacked say that their website was down for five or more hours, and just under a quarter of the victim organizations say their sites were down for 12 hours or more.

All but 16% of the respondents have some sort of DDoS protection in place. That protection is evenly split between in-house and third-party managed services. The majority of those managed services rely on over-subscribing bandwidth to mitigate the impact of DDoS. This adds expense, and attackers can counter by increasing their bandwidth.

While there are specialized anti-DDoS appliances on the market from vendors such as Arbor Networks, most organizations rely on their firewalls and/or network intrusion prevention systems for in-house mitigation.

"A lot of people think they have DDoS protection when they really don't," says Leach. "Firewalls only protect you from very simple DDoS attacks like SYN floods. Bad guys are using very application-specific attacks, and always have more bandwidth than you." Leach also said that most organizations have neither the expertise nor the threat intelligence for effective DDoS mitigation, and recommends specialized anti-DDoS managed services (such as Verisign's DDoS Protection Services).

Tags:

News
Networking