DDoS Prevention and a Helicopter Ride

Choosing between going on a helicopter ride over London on a sunny day or attending a press briefing about cyber security and how to prevent DDoS attacks from hurting financial institutions is a tough decision – but luckily for me Neustar offered both at their latest press day!

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are on the rise, and when you look at the figures you quickly understand that it’s essential for any organisation to understand them, in particular financial institutions because they manage so much confidential customer data – and of course money.

Very simply put, DDoS attacks are carried out by hackers and are bad news for the target. The reasons for initiating a DDoS attack varies; from damaging a company’s reputation, to financial gains or stealing valuable customer data. DDoS is also often used to distract a business whilst the hacker steals money or data for example. They mainly happen in Q4 because there are so many transactions happening online; online shopping events such as Black Friday and numerous public holidays. It takes around six hours for a company to even discover that they have been attacked and a huge concern is that the attacks are getting more complex.

According to Neustar, out of 1010 organisations surveyed, 849 have been targets of DDoS attacks in the last year – and 85% of those more than once. A DDoS attack can cost an organisation more than $2.5 million on average and can have devastating consequences for a firm’s reputation.

Needless to say that if you’re a large institution, you need to know about DDoS attacks but also be able to protect yourself against them. That’s where Neustar comes in. Originally an information services company, it is now growing its DDoS department. It has hired Barrett Lyon,   pioneer of the DDoS defence industry, to help Neustar grow within this field. By early 2018, it plans to have increased its DDoS mitigation network attack ingestion capacity to 10Tbps  – making it the company with the highest capacity in the world. An ambitious project, but Lyon says: “With the completion of our new global constellation of scrubbing centres, we will have the largest, most distributed, and technically advanced DDoS defence network on the planet.”

Neustar is currently publicly traded but has been acquired by private investment group Golden Gate in a transaction valued at approximately $2.9 billion. Although already a very established multi-national company, it feels very much like Neustar is about to take off to new highs with its latest DDoS protection service.

Perhaps combining the new strategy announcement with a helicopter ride was very fitting indeed.

Written by Lea Jakobiak, Reporter forFintech Finance