DDoS Attack Cost Bandwidth.com Nearly $12 Million- How to Protect Your Site Against One?

Recent years have witnessed a sharp surge in DDoS attacks, and the cost of attack is also steadily increasing. SMEs spend, on average, $120k per attack. As more and more businesses move to the cloud, it is essential to be aware of the risks associated with DDoS attacks. The cost of DDoS attacks can affect your company’s bottom line as it can shut down its infrastructure, applications, communications, and other vital services.

Bandwidth.com’s multimillion loss on DDoS attacks alarms the intensity of the attack. In October 2021, Bandwidth Inc. was a victim of a DDoS campaign that targeted several global Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers.

Rising Cost of DDoS Attacks: Bandwidth Inc. Lost Over $12 Million

Bandwidth Inc, the VoIP titan’s portal Bandwidth.com, ranked in $131 million in sales for their third-quarter profits. However, according to a recent press release, the recent cost of DDoS attacks would have a financial impact of between $9 million and $12 million for the whole fiscal year.

In September 2021, David Morken, the Chief Executive Officer of Bandwidth,  confirmed that the platform suffered outages due to a DDoS attack that affected other VoIP vendors like Phone.com, DiaPad, Twilio, and RingCentral. At the time, Bandwidth told customers that the issue was coming from an “upstream provider.”

While the cause of the outage was eventually fixed, the incident highlights the high cost of DDoS attacks, both in terms of financial damage and customer satisfaction.

The preliminary data estimates that the impact of this attack will lower the company CPaaS revenue by $9 million to $12 million for the FY’21, including a $0.7 million revenue impact in the third quarter.

In addition to the direct cost of the attack, companies also incur indirect costs such as lost productivity, damaged reputation, and missed opportunities.

Bandwidth also noticed that it lost a few customers after this attack. However, customers have indicated their interest in returning to them after assuring them of better DDoS protection.

Leading Causes of Sophisticated DDoS Attacks

When attacks are timed and coordinated for maximum impact, they can severely impact a company’s bottom line. This is particularly true when attackers target cloud providers charging by the hour or having data caps.

The cost of DDoS attacks has risen in recent years as attackers have become more sophisticated and the stakes have increased. In 2019, the average cost of a DDoS attack was $2.6 million, up from $1.6 million the year before. And this trend is likely to continue with the increase in unsecured devices, migration to 5G, and the explosion of the DDoS-as-a-service industry.

So, what are the possible factors for this sudden increase in DDoS attacks?

1. The development of the DDoS-as-a-service platform has dropped the barriers to entry for becoming a DDoS attacker
2. Dark web toolkits have reduced the cost of launching a DDoS attack by almost half
3. Botnets largely launch DDoS attacks, and the increase in the number of botnets could be another reason

AppTrana’s Four Step DDoS Mitigation Process

Given the variety of attacks listed above, DDoS attacks cannot be solved by increasing the network bandwidth. A multi-layered mitigation solution such as AppTrana WAF can prevent application-layered DDoS attacks and can help you stay ahead of the competition.

1. Detects the anomalies in traffic flow as early as possible to stop the DDoS attack and minimize the damage.
2. When the attack is identified, the traffic is rerouted away from the target. Then the decision is made to either filter the traffics or completely discard them.
3. With WAF page rules, it responds to the incoming traffic by dropping malicious traffic and absorbing the rest of the legitimate data traffic.
4. The actionable analytics report provides complete visibility of the attack traffic to enable instant understanding of the attack and enhance future cyber resilience.

DDoS Protection Fundamental Best Practices

• Your must-have continuous network monitoring to quickly detect and easily mitigate attacks. Relying on manual responses can make your organization vulnerable to effective attacks.
• In addition to automating your mitigation response and adding a tool with sufficient network capacity, you can also minimize the number of open ports and IP addresses.
• Educate employees through simulation exercises to help them understand how to deal with ransom demands.

Learn from AppTrana’s Anti-DDoS Success Story

AppTrana is on the front lines to protect your business from DDoS attacks. Explore how our fully managed DDoS protection solution has successfully mitigated some intense and unique DDoS attacks:

• DDoS Attack against eCommerce platform
• Automobile Industries targeted in DDoS Attack
• Advance DDOS Protection for Leading Insurance Company

To try AppTrana, start your 14 days free trial today.

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