Cyber insurers now have a new complexity to deal with – as you can now launch a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against anyone on your warpath for $25 a pop as the ‘DDoS as a service’ model emerges.
That is the finding of cyber security firm Kaspersky in a recently released report. It means that criminals who do not have technical expertise can launch attacks and rake in as much as 95% in profits.
Michael Canavan, Kaspersky Lab North America senior vice president, told trade publication CIO.com that the prices of attacks are expected to continue to dip as more connected devices go online without proper security measures, making them an easy target for botnet operators.
A typical attack now costs only $7 an hour to launch with 1,000 rented cloud based servers, he added.
Riding on infected internet of things (IoT) devices drives the price even lower, the report said. These devices are enabled with capabilities to transmit and receive data through the internet and are most vulnerable because they have low levels of built in security.
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“The internet of things has the potential to have a big impact for DDoS attacks as you move into the future. It really makes security of IoT a critical topic around DDos attacks,” Canavan said in the report.
He added that the low cost involved in launching an attack makes it possible to target a broader base of
victims, outside the large organizations that were previously the most vulnerable to such criminal activity.
Because DDoS as a service distances the attacker from the attack itself, organizations can launch attacks against their competitors, and it makes it easier to launch politically motivated criminal activity, or simply cause random damage.
“It opens the doors for different motivations behind the attacks,” he concluded.
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