The time to respond and mitigate DDoS attacks can be costly for companies, and some businesses can lose roughly $2.5 million on average per attack, a research report released today said.
Neustar, an analytics firm that sees swathes of DDoS attack telemetry daily, boiled down some of the figures in a dispatch, its annual Worldwide DDoS Attacks and Cyber Insights Research Report, on Tuesday.
The data was culled from a survey it carries out bi-annually to track the shifting trends of DDoS attacks; 849 of the 1,010 organizations it surveyed, 84 percent, had been hit by a DDoS attack. A slight tick more, 86 percent, of respondents, had been hit by a DDoS attack multiple times.
Together, the 849 companies lost $2.2 billion in revenue over the last 12 months responding to the attacks, according to the report.
One company, a video gaming firm based in the US that makes $1M an hour in revenue, said it was attacked between two to five times in the last 12 months. While the company is at the high end of the spectrum, Neustar claims each DDoS attack may have cost the firm between $12M and $30M to mitigate, assuming the attacks take three hours to detect and three hours to respond to.
For 63 percent of the companies Neustar talked to, a DDoS attack can amount to a loss of $100,000 in revenue per hour. That’s up 13 percent, from 50 percent in 2016, the firm says. Attacks can cost even higher, $250,000 per hour, for 43 percent of organizations it talked to, according to the report.