As we begin to come out of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., we enter a new world of business in many facets. One area of profound change is the pandemic’s impact on the conventional work model. Over the past year, the way we work has moved at an accelerated rate into the digital space as organizations adapted their operations to enable a distributed workforce and maintain productivity. This shift placed increased reliance on connectivity and the performance and security of enterprise networks – not just to drive business performance but to protect against malicious actors attempting to profit from business disruption.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are among the most common and most serious threats to any business that operates with a distributed workforce model, and they are growing ever larger and more frequent. According to a recent study from Corero, a DDoS mitigation technology platform provider, larger attacks ranging from 10 to hundreds of Gbps increased by 50% in 2020. What’s more, these attacks are also being actively weaponized in the growing wave of cyber extortion and ransomware, as evidence by the recent Colonial Pipeline attack. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the number of ransomware attacks increased by more than 300% from the previous year.