Marketers shoulder hacking costs

Marketing departments, call centres and customer service teams are being saddled with the huge costs associated with online attacks against their companies – which can top £240,000 a day – according to a new study.
The “2014: The Danger Deepens” report by Neustar surveyed 331 companies in the UK, across a range of sectors including financial services, technology, retail, public sector, healthcare, energy, utilities, telecommunications, e-commerce, Internet services and media.
It revealed that 32% of companies estimate losses of over £240,000 per day during a so-called distributed denial of service (DDoS) outage, with marketing and call centres absorbing over 40% of costs.
The number of UK companies hit by DDoS attacks in 2013 was 35% up on 2012, with many of being far more persistent attacks, and 28% lasting for up to two days. Once attacked, Neustar found there was a 69% chance of a repeat attack; 31% of the companies surveyed were attacked just once, and over 48% were targeted between two and 10 times.
Neustar senior vice-president Rodney Joffe warned enterprises that DDoS attacks were evolving rapidly: “Organisations must remain constantly vigilant and abreast of the latest threats. As an example, Neustar’s UltraDNS network suffered an attack just last week peaking at over 250Gbps – a massive attack by industry standards. Even with proper mitigations in place, the attack caused an upstream ripple. It is a constantly changing threat.”

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