Some 12% of Belgian SMEs have had to face a denial of service (DDoS) attack at least once, followed by smaller SMEs and the self-employed with 11%. Larger businesses do slightly better with 9%, according to research by Kaspersky Lab, a specialised IT security firm, published on Wednesday. Worldwide, 25% of these attacks led to the loss of sensitive data.
These attacks make a server, a service, or computing infrastructure unavailable by overloading the bandwidth of the server or diverting resources until they are depleted.
Repair costs can reach 367,000 Euros. “A DDoS attack usually costs over 40,000 Euros to restore the server. Large companies spend even more after an external disturbance or cyber-attack. The average investment after a DDoS attack is approximately 376,000 Euros, and 546,000 Euros on average to recover from other types of attacks,” explains the report entitled 'Corporate IT Security Risks Survey', compiled by Kapersky Lab and B2B International who surveyed 5,500 firms worldwide.
Globally, 9% of attacks affecting a service last between 2 and 7 days, and in 7% of cases they can last for weeks or more. But the impact can be worse than just interrupting internet activity: business operations are sometimes affected and for 7% of SMEs polled, confidential data was lost.
(Source: Belga)
