Most organizations have encountered DNS attacks, and the average cost for each is around $924,000 – reports EfficientIP.
Nearly 79% of the organizations have faced DNS attacks, and its impact is financially damaging. The average cost of any DNS attack is a hefty about $924,000. These findings are from the latest report by EfficientIP, titled “The 2020 Global DNS Threat Report”, in association with IDC. The research study found that organizations spanning all the industries have suffered an average of 9.5 attacks in 2020. The figures demonstrate the pivotal function of the DNS in network security. Basically, the threat actors utilize the dual capacity of DNS as a threat vector as well as a direct objective.
In case of regional damage from the DNS attacks, North America tops the list with an average cost of $1,073,000 for the attack. However, this is a slight decrease of 1.36% from the previous year. The United States had about a 4% decline in the attack damages, but still, cost the highest globally at $1,082,710. Cybercriminals increasingly appear to target the cloud. Unsurprising, most of the business-critical applications are hosted in hybrid-cloud today, and more companies are following it. The organizations that suffered cloud service downtime have surged from 41% to 50% YOY. Thus, 2020 saw a sharp growth of 22% cyber- attacks.
Similarly, the rise in the adoption of cloud services amid the widespread pandemic could result in a more severe and increased rate of cloud attacks. As mentioned by Ronan David, VP of Strategy at EfficientIP, “In this era of key IT initiatives like IoT, Edge, SD-WAN, and 5G,DNS should play a much larger role in the security ecosystem…It offers valuable information that can make security strategies against hackers, much more proactive and preventative. The pandemic has exacerbated the need to shore up DNS defenses when any network or app downtime has major business implications.”
As per the report, the in-house app downtime is exceptionally high, with 62% in 2020. The application downtime (in-house or in the cloud) is the primary result of the DNS attacks. Among the surveyed respondents, 82% noted that they had encountered application downtime of some kind. The researchers found a broad range and evolving popularity of the attack types – from volumetric to low signal. This year, companies suffered different attacks – phishing attacks (39%), malware-based hit (34%) and traditional DDoS attacks (27%). And, the size of DDoS attacks is continually rising, with nearly two-thirds (64%) being more than 5Gbit/s.
With this growing concern, enterprises are improving upon their awareness programs to combat these attacks. About 77% of respondents reported that DNS security is a vital component in their network architecture. Besides, the use of Zero Trust strategies is growing – nearly 31% are now using or piloting it, and another 55% noted using predictive
analytics.
Romain Fouchereau, Research Manager of European Security at IDC as mentioned, “The consequences of such attacks can be very damaging financially, but also have a direct impact on the ability to conduct business. Ensuring DNS service availability and integrity must become a priority for any organization.”
