Mandingo

WHITE PAPER

APPROACHES TO DDOS
PROTECTION:
A COST ANALYSIS

VerisignInc.com

CONTENTS

WHAT DOES DDOS COST AN ORGANIZATION?

3

ELEMENTS THAT MAKE UP A DDOS SOLUTION

4

DEFENDING AGAINST DDOS ATTACKS: FINDING THE APPROACH THAT’S RIGHT
F OR EACH ORGANIZATION
5
CONCLUSION: RAMP UP PROTECTION WHILE REDUCING COSTS

7

ABOUT THE VERISIGN DDOS PROTECTION SERVICE

8LEARN MORE

9

ABOUT VERISIGN

9

ALL ORGANIZATIONS WITH AN ONLINE PRESENCE OR DEPENDENCE ON INTERNETBASED SYSTEMS NEED TO FORTIFY THEIR DEFENSES AGAINST DISTRIBUTED DENIAL
OF SERVICE (DDOS) ATTACKS. THESE ATTACKS—WHICH CAN DISRUPT ONLINE
SERVICES AND APPLICATIONS—HAVE BEEN CITED AS THE NUMBER-ONE OPERATIONAL
SECURITY PROBLEM FACING THE SERVICE PROVIDER COMMUNITY TODAY. IN A RECENTFORRESTER SURVEY, 74 PERCENT OF RESPONDENTS REPORTED EXPERIENCING A
DDOS ATTACK IN THE 12-MONTH PERIOD ENDING MARCH 2009.1

In 2009, organizations experienced more than 350,000 DDoS attacks,2 affecting businesses with critical online applications
across all vertical and market segments. Attacks are also becoming larger, with peak DDoS attack size growing from about
400 Mbps in 2001 to over 69 Gbpsin 2010. Every 26 minutes, on average, an organization comes under an attack larger
than 1 Gbps, and every 190 minutes an attack takes place that’s larger than 10 Gbps. At the same time, 58 percent
of networks surveyed by Forrester reported increased attack complexity and a greater focus on application availability. With
b otnets available for rent at $100 per day or less,3 anybody with agrudge or an agenda can easily obtain the computing
power they need to launch a DDoS attack, on a scale that will easily overwhelm most organizations.
1 Forrester® Consulting, The Trends and Changing Landscape of DDoS Threats and Protection, July 2009
2 Arbor Networks The Internet Goes to War, December 2010; Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, Vol. IV; October 2008
3www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139398/With_botnets_everywhere_DDoS_attacks_get_cheaper

WHAT DOES DDOS COST AN
ORGANIZATION?
DDoS can cost an organization
intangible losses and in more subtle
ways—whether it has been attacked
or whether it is just dedicating
resources to defend against an
attack. An attack that effectively
impacts target systems disrupts the
revenue from these systems for the
duration of theattack, often with
residual effects. Additionally, once
the attack is over, the interruption to
an organization’s service can inflict
lasting damage on its reputation,
as well as negatively impacting
customer satisfaction and trust.

Even if an organization has never
been attacked, both the far-reaching
effects and high probability of
D DoS means it will still need to take
steps toprotect against potential
attacks. Keeping up with the DDoS
arms race requires spending on
bandwidth, hardware, and expertise.
If an organization’s most critical
assets are in some way tied to its
online availability, then it needs to
ensure that availability by protecting
against DDoS attacks, both at
the network and application layer.
Every organization needs to weigh
all these costs toselect the right
D DoS mitigation strategy. It should

estimate how much damage a DDoS
attack could cause by calculating
how much each minute of downtime
costs for each of its most critical
Internet-facing assets, estimating
the probability and projected rate of
occurrence of such incidents, and
then using those numbers to decide
on a budget. Once the organization
has decided how muchprotection it
wants and how much it can spend, it
is ready to consider the features and
costs of the different approaches
to DDoS mitigation—traditional
on-premises filtering, on-premises
or ISP-based intelligent filtering,
and cloud-based services—to get
3

the maximum protection from that
investment.
ELEMENTS THAT MAKE UP A
D DOS SOLUTION
In evaluating the different approaches...