Vodafone has launched its DDoS mitigation proposition for businesses and governments in Qatar which will provide assured connectivity to dedicated Internet customers, enabling safer communications over the Internet.
DDoS attacks are Denial-of-Service attacks that leverage the massive, distributed, and stolen computing power from infected endpoints to flood target networks and web applications with traffic. DDoS attacks disrupt operations and prevent users from accessing critical Web applications.
This downtime results in loss of productivity, loss of visitor traffic, loss of e-commerce transactions, revenue loss, impact to competitive position, negative brand impact, loss of reputation, reduction in share price, loss of business data and rise in IT expenditure to defend from attacks.
More than 40% of companies which were attacked reported theft of funds, data or intellectual property and for some financial and web based businesses, DDos attacks can result in millions of riyals of damages per hour.
“DDos attacks are continuing to evolve in the region and show a continuation of extremely high volume attacks posing a huge risk to organisations and governments. Vodafone was the first service provider globally to provide a managed DDoS mitigation service. We have been protecting our customers from DDoS attacks since 2004. By combining leading-edge technologies into one resilient platform, we detect attacks in real time and we use advanced techniques to mitigate them, including dynamic filtering, active verification of packets, anomaly detection, protocol analysis and rate limiting,” said Mahmud Awad, Chief Business Officer, Vodafone Qatar.
The number of attacks in the Middle East in the first half of this year rose to 61,937 compared to 29,326 in 2014. Sectors such as oil and gas and financial services are particularly vulnerable in the region and with the emergence of the Internet of Things and the era of connected devices and smart cities, the attack surface is set to grow exponentially, a Vodafone statement said.