The reality of rising DDoS attacks

As one of the most commonly used money-making techniques by cybercriminals, the number and strength of attacks continues to rise daily, forcing the issue of safeguarding users higher up the corporate agenda. With companies at risk of losing between $10,000 and $50,000 a day as a result of attacks – as well as the additional reputational damage – the research indicates that 26 per cent of European companies consider continuity of service one of their top three IT priorities for 2015.

To help businesses address this growing threat, Kaspersky Lab announces the European launch of Kaspersky DDoS Protection – a new solution designed to protect online services against DDoS attacks. Kaspersky Lab’s extensive expertise in cyber-threats and its experience in successfully combating them, as well as its bespoke intelligent technologies, enables the solution to handle DDoS attacks of any size and complexity.

An important part of Kaspersky DDoS Protection is a distributed infrastructure of traffic cleaning centers located across Europe. Kaspersky Lab DDoS intelligence helps to ensure that, as well as repelling DDoS attacks, potential threats can be identified at a very early stage. This also makes it possible to adjust system settings as necessary – in real-time – providing customers with reliable protection from financial and reputational risks.

The objective of a DDoS attack to overwhelm an information system a website or database - with a huge number of requests, making it unavailable to users, reasons for organising an attack range from hooliganism and terrorism, through to unfair competition and even extortion.

The low cost of attacks (an unscrupulous person can order a service called ‘DDoS attack’ for as little as $50 per day), the impossibility of tracking the perpetrators, and the large number of bot-infected computers and mobile devices across the globe, also make DDoS attacks one of today’s most widespread and dangerous cyber-threats.

“DDoS attacks have no boundaries, with victims ranging from large international companies to small local online stores,” comments Alexander Moiseev, Managing Director, Europe, Kaspersky Lab. “Moreover, DDoS is often part of a targeted attack against an organization, when online services are overloaded to provide a diversion while attackers access critical data. To protect customers from this threat and minimize their losses due to service idle time, we have released Kaspersky DDoS Protection.”

One of Kaspersky DDoS Protection’s key advantages is that the software used to monitor and clean traffic has been developed in-house. This means that the way the solution works can be altered rapidly in response to changes in the techniques used by the attackers, even during an ongoing attack. In addition, Kaspersky DDoS Protection can filter most of the traffic involved in attacks on the provider’s side, if the ISP concerned has a technology partnership agreement with Kaspersky Lab. That means only a small amount of highly sophisticated junk traffic needs to be diverted to Kaspersky Lab’s cleaning centers.

Experts monitoring Kaspersky DDoS Protection can adjust and modify the detection and filters according to the threat landscape at the time. This additional level of protection is quickly modifiable and implementable, amplifying the protection offered to customers. By offering customers tailored protection, specific to their own circumstances and risk situation, we can be confident the protection offered is the best.

Before entering the European market, Kaspersky Lab had successfully applied and perfected its DDoS protection techniques and technologies in Russia and CIS countries.

To ensure the highest possible level of reliability, Kaspersky Lab only uses European equipment and service suppliers for traffic cleaning and monitoring in European countries. All the traffic cleaning centers are in Europe and the customer traffic metadata analysed by the service never leaves the territory of the European Union.