International. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks will continue to pose security risks to businesses in Latin America through 2024.
That's according to Helder Ferrão, director of Industry Strategy for Latin America at Akamai Technologies, who highlights that while some organizations may believe they are low-risk targets, the growing reliance on Internet connectivity means that everyone is left exposed if infrastructure is not protected.
Organizations need to understand that experiencing a security incident is a matter of time. It's no longer a question of thinking about whether it will happen, but preparing for when it will happen, he said.
The average annual cost of a DDoS attack on an organization is $1.7 million due to increased workload for technical support services, use of incident response resources, legal costs, operational disruptions and lost employee productivity, according to the Ponemon Institute.
Akamai's study 'A Retrospective of DDoS Trends in 2023 and Viable Strategies for 2024' revealed that throughout 2023 DDoS attacks became more frequent, longer, highly sophisticated (multi-vectored), and focused on horizontal targets, attacking multiple IP targets in the same attack event.
The financial services industry had the most DDoS attacks in 2023 globally. "It is important to mention that many DDoS attacks were sustained campaigns for more than 20 minutes, and the number of attacks that continued for more than an hour increased by 50% between 2021 and 2023," Ferrão said.
Against this backdrop, Akamai recommended three strategies to effectively defend against DDoS attacks in 2024.
Taking a DDoS Protection Posture
According to Helder Ferrão, although DDoS attacks cannot be prevented, it is possible to protect digital assets. To do this, he first recommended reviewing critical subnets and IP spaces, as well as making sure you have mitigation controls in place.
Subsequently, establish DDoS security controls under an always-on protection posture as the first layer of defense to avoid an emergency integration scenario and thus reduce the burden on incident response services.
Securing the Domain Name System
DNS infrastructure has re-emerged as a major target for DDoS attacks. "If your DNS fails, so does your online presence. Attacks may not always aim to disable DNS name servers. Perhaps they simply expect to exhaust resources and deteriorate the performance of the global server's load balancing to the point that legitimate requests are affected," Helder Ferrão warned.
He noted that a traditional DNS firewall provides inadequate protection. For this reason, he recommended a hybrid platform that allows you to protect both local and cloud DNS zones from all types of attacks.
Don't rely on solutions that are "good enough."
"2023 was the year of the unsuspecting and underprepared victims in this area, many of whom had underestimated how DDoS threats had evolved and overestimated what their existing security could handle," the executive said.
In addition, he advised testing defenses both from the perspective of technological solutions and from a vision of best practices. This includes incident execution manuals, processes, documentation, and so on, which can make the difference between questionable preparedness and world-class cybersecurity.
"Today, you can leverage existing DDoS mitigation solutions designed to instantly stop these attacks in the cloud, before they reach applications, data centers, and infrastructure. We need to always stay on top of evolving threats and readjust protection and mitigation solutions to provide a more resilient environment."
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