Data center as an object for DDoS - the trend of the new time

DDoS is not going to surprise anyone now - it is used by many, from military organizations to ordinary schoolchildren, who decided to “hang up” their fellow classmate’s blankets. Until recently, DDoS or mostly separate sites (even Habr did not escape this fate).

But recently, ddosit has become not only individual resources, but also entire data centers, and not the smallest ones. According to the Worldwide Security Report from the Arbor Network, most representatives of service providers consider DDoS one of the most dangerous threats to a business.
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The capacity of equipment is growing, and the capabilities of those who carry out orders for DDoS are growing. So, last year an attack of 309 gigabit / s was recorded for the first time. Previously, this figure was 100 gigabits per second, rarely more, more often - less.



At the same time, about 70% of data centers were subjected to DDoS attacks last year, which is quite a lot. 10% of this amount reflected 100 or more attacks per month.

At the same time, the fact of ddos-attacks is unpleasant enough for a single resource — visitors, calls, clicks on advertisements, money, and so on are lost. But on the scale of a data center, successful DDoS can be a disaster. After all, the data center serves hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of resources and services, many of which are critical for business. Clients suffer losses, service providers suffer losses.



And the DDoS scales of data centers are constantly growing. Thus, according to the Ponemon Institute, about 18% of the total number of data center outages are due to DDoS attacks. In this case, in the case of a normal failure, the data center team will restore systems to work faster than in the case of DDoS, since the identification and elimination of problems caused by such attacks require new information and new technologies.

The average cost of restoring the data center is 822 thousand US dollars. Large losses are only due to serious hardware failures (here the average cost of restoring work after a failure is 959 thousand US dollars). For the most part, such losses are due to the fact that the price per minute of data center idleness has increased by about 40% since 2010. So, at the end of last year, a minute of idle data center cost the management of the data center at $ 7908. In 2010, the same figure was 5617 US dollars.

According to some experts, for example, Eric Hanselman (451 Research), the reason for the increased attention of attackers to date = centers is largely due to the fact that many companies are now in the public domain spreading information about where their resources are hosted (including “ cloud "services). And sometimes the cost of an attack on a single large resource is equal to the cost of an attack on the entire data center, where the resource is hosted. At the same time, other services depending on the specific data center also go down.

In general, all this is the reason for the increase in the number and power of attacks on data centers. Apparently, the trend will grow in the coming months and years. So, ahead - the emergence of new technologies of protection, including hardware and software.