Lucian Constantin of IDG News Service explains that although the magnitude of recent distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) has decreased over the past few months, the actual number of attacks has increased dramatically, putting smaller companies and websites at risk. These attacks, which occur when multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system, basically attempt to interrupt connection to the internet and open the network to spam.
In the third quarter alone, the number of recorded DDoS attacks has increased by 180 percent compared to the Q3 in 2014. Consequently, these attacks have followed a trend of having a lower bandwidth over a shorter period of time. Constantin explains that while this does result in attacks being less severe, smaller companies and their websites are at an increased risk because these attacks are often used as an extortion tool through for-hire services.