Dealing squarely with cyberthreats | The Manila Times
DISTRIBUTED Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have unfortunately proliferated at an exponential rate over the years — with more than 9.75 million separate attacks carried out in 2021. These threats impose a heavy toll on enterprises far beyond the financial cost of the ransomware — loss of revenue during downtime, reputation damage, legal repercussions from security negligence and potential exposure to larger cyberthreats.
Against this backdrop, Richard Yew, senior director Product Management for Security, Edgio, shares with The Manila Times deeper insights on mitigating cyberattacks, the latest trends in the application security space and building up cyber resilience in the face of rapidly evolving threats.
The Manila Times (TMT): Why do DDoS attacks persist? What are the opportunities that have arisen for these attacks in 2021 and what are the “holes” in the defenses of enterprises particularly among micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs)?
Richard Yew (RYW): Cybersecurity is all about protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability (collectively known as the “CIA” triad) of system and data. DDoS attacks continue to be the most effective means of compromising the availability of the victim’s online presence, by causing anything between performance issues and complete outage.
Some pertinent reasons why DDoS attacks persist, and even increase in frequency and size in the last few years, include:
– Cheap botnet and DDoS-for-hire services. The barrier of entry to launch DDoS attacks has never been lower, while the adverse impact on business is immensely significant.
– Proliferation of IoT. An increase in the number of smart devices means that it’s now easy for an attacker to acquire a large botnet to launch a massive DDoS attack.
– Financial motivation. DDoS ransom is a very effective way to get immediate…
