Given the increasing volumes and prevalence of cyber attack globally the worldwide market for DDoS prevention solutions (including products and services) will grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.2% from 2012 through 2017 and reach $870 million, according to forecast by research firm IDC.

The research says that many of the leading financial firm have been attacked by hackers and these attacks are increasing in frequency, data volumes and application specificity.

The study says that these attacks render servers and/or network resources unavailable by overwhelming them with traffic. The evolution from hacktivism to financial gain to disguising more targeted attacks is evidence of a re-emerging trend that exploits the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of some of the world's largest and most powerful organizations.

In 2012, there was a sharp increase in the frequency, bandwidth volume, and applications orientation of these attacks. "As these attacks surged in prevalence and sophistication, organizations were often caught unaware. Embedded capabilities were quickly overwhelmed and outages were readily apparent on the Web. This is driving the need for proactive solutions to protect customer's infrastructure from current and future attacks," said Christian A, Christiansen, Vice President, Security Products & Services research at IDC. As detailed in the IDC forecast, the worldwide market for DDoS prevention solutions (including products and services) will grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.2% from 2012 through 2017 and reach $870 million.

Volumetric attacks will remain the predominant type of DDoS attacks throughout the forecast period. These simple yet devastating attacks are exceedingly effective due to the relative ease with which botnets can send a bandwidth flood that can cripple most enterprise infrastructures.

Despite volumetric-based attacks remaining most popular, more advanced hybrid attacks that include application layer and encrypted traffic will grow. This will drive growth in the on-premise equipment market throughout the forecast period. "With the number of high-profile attacks steadily increasing, the market for DDoS prevention solutions will surge," said John Grady, Research Manager for IDC's Security Products program. "A defense-in-depth posture with a combination of on-premise equipment and cloud-based mitigation provides the best protection against advanced application and SSL-based attacks as well as large-scale volumetric attacks."

Spamhaus, which operates a filtering service used to weed out spam emails, has been under attack since 18 March after adding a Dutch hosting organisation called Cyberbunkerto its list of unwelcome internet sites. The service has "made plenty of enemies", said one expert, and the cyber-attack appeared to be retaliation.

A collateral effect of the attack is that internet users accustomed to high-speed connections may have seen those slow down, said James Blessing, a member of the UK Internet Service Providers' Association (ISPA) council.

"It varies depending on where you are and what site you're trying to get to," he said. "Those who are used to it being really quick will notice." Some people accessing the online streaming site Netflix reported a slowdown.

Once a cyber-attack has been initiated, there are certain targets that need to be attacked to cripple the opponent. Certain infrastructures as targets have been highlighted as critical infrastructures in time of conflict that can severely cripple a nation. Control systems, energy resources, finance, telecommunications, transportation, and water facilities are seen as critical infrastructure targets during conflict.

A new report on the industrial cybersecurity problems, produced by the British Columbia Institute of Technology, and the PA Consulting Group, using data from as far back as 1981, reportedly has found a 10-fold increase in the number of successful cyber-attacks on infrastructure Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems since 2000.[11] This was just one example that shows how easy it is to attack a selected control systems infrastructure and that other infrastructures could be subject to countless cyber-attacks if the vulnerability and opportunity presented itself.

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