A global study commissioned by BT and carried out by Vanson Bourne found out that 41% of companies surveyed have been hit by DDoS attacks during the past year.
A third of the respondents claimed to have been hit twice or more, and more than half of UK organisations said that DDoS accounted for more than six hours downtime (or >0.0006%), with companies taking up to half a day to recover from a a full-blown attack.
The research, which surveyed a total of 640 IT decision makers in 11 countries, discovered that 36% of UK respondents find DDoS attacks a key concern. The figure marks a much lower proportion compared to their international counterparts (58%).
Response plan
Nearly half of UK entities have a response plan in place although less than 10% of the respondents believe that they have sufficient resources to deal with an attack in the first place.
Worringly, nearly two-thirds believe that hackers are coming up with more complex and more powerful DDoS attacks with hybrid ones rising by 41% last year.
DDoS are often launched from compromised computers as part of a botnet that and simultaneously overwhelm the target servers with repeated requests, which ends up making websites slow or worst, unavailable.
