In its Dark Web Price Index 2020 NordVPN said the current average prices for a selection of cybercrime products and services available "on demand." A basic targeted malware attack in Europe or the US costs $300, while a targeted distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack goes for as little as $10 per hour or $60 for 24 hours. The "salespeople" even offer volume discounts, making such attacks the go-to weapon for online extortion.

According to Gartner research, the average cost of downtime for a small-to-midsize business is $5,600 per minute so these attacks are certainly a good investment if you want something to hurt.

NordVPN Teams Chief Technology Officer Juta Gurinaviciute said that one reason why DDoS attacks are so inexpensive is that more and more people that offer DDoS-for-hire services are leveraging the scale and bandwidth of public clouds. With remote work becoming the new standard and with emphasis on home internet connectivity at an all time high, proper security measures to mitigate these attacks have never been more important.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are a serious threat to modern network security. Their goal is to take down the target by either flooding traffic or triggering a crash. These attacks are often sourced from virtual machines in the cloud rather than from the attacker’s own machine, which is done to achieve anonymity and higher network bandwidth.

Typically, these types of attacks are run through botnets — networks of computer devices hijacked and infected by bots to carry out various scams and cyberattacks. A bot is a piece of malicious software that gets orders from another device or attacker. A computer becomes infected when a worm or virus installs the bot, or when the user visits a malicious website that exploits a vulnerability in the browser.

‘’Organisations around the globe are embracing remote work at unprecedented rates. This has made online services of all kinds — from governments to banks and e-commerce to e-learning — more vulnerable to criminals, and DDoS attacks more alluring as a means of extortion. Such attacks don't cost much and can produce excellent returns. When online connections are stopped or significantly slowed for even a few hours, employees' work is disrupted, and customers can't buy anything, which all leads to damaged revenues and public image of the organization’,’ says Gartner.

Without early threat detection and traffic profiling systems, it’s impossible to know a DDoS attack has occurred. In fact, you will only know about it when your website slows down or comes to a complete halt.

These attacks target data, applications, and infrastructure simultaneously to increase the chances of success. To fight them, an integrated security strategy protecting all infrastructure levels is necessary.

• Develop a Denial of Service response plan. Make sure your data center is prepared, a checklist is in place, and your team is aware of their responsibilities.
• Secure your network infrastructure. This includes advanced intrusion prevention and threat management systems — which combine firewalls, VPN, anti-spam, content filtering — and load balancing. Together, they enable constant and consistent network protection against DDoS attacks.
• Make sure your systems are up to date. By regularly patching your infrastructure and installing new software versions, you can close more doors to attackers.
• Leverage the cloud. Cloud-based apps can curb harmful or malicious traffic before it ever reaches its intended destination. Such services are operated by software engineers whose job is to monitor the web for the latest DDoS tactics and attack vectors.
• Avoid public or unsecured Wi-Fi. If your remote team must log in to an account on a network you don’t trust, use a VPN to encrypt all communications. Even bank websites can be forged to be almost undetectable. So, if an attacker has administrative access to the network you’re using, a data breach may occur.