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The next few days will mark the anniversary of the first known case of a cyberattack method that continues to keep companies of all sizes and industries on their toes. On July 22, 1999, a computer of the University of Minnesota in the USA was attacked by a network of 114 other computers – on which the program Trin00 was running, which was later used time and again to launch DDoS attacks.

Link11, a leading IT security provider specialised in cloud-based DDoS protection, today announces that the company has signed a new distribution agreement with Progress Distribution, a value-added distributor focusing on information and cyber security. 

Every third company in Germany became a victim of cyber-attacks in 2018. This is the result of the Cyber Security Survey conducted by the Federal Office for Information Security. In almost 90% of the cases, the attackers were successful and caused business interruptions. This, in turn, produced costs for forensic investigations and the restoration of IT systems.

The IT security provider is significantly expanding its activities in the media sector. The production, broadcast and IT company CBC is using Link11’s DDoS protection with immediate effect to secure its Internet access and the on-premise infrastructure that is used, among other things, for the B2B traffic of Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland.

Since early May 2019, numerous data centers, ISPs and hosting providers in Italy have received extortion mails on behalf of the “Turkish hackers”. The cyber-criminals demand Bitcoins to stop large-scale DDoS attacks of more than 100 Gbps.

Europe continues to be a target for DDoS attacks, as the current DDoS attack figures from the Link11 Security Operation Center show. Link11 registered 11,177 DDoS attacks on targets in Europe in Q1 2019. These high attack volumes and the large number of different attack vectors pose significant challenges to companies that lack appropriate protection.

The implications of DDoS attacks have become increasingly severe in recent months. The consequences are no longer limited to online service outages in a few industries such as banking, hosting, mobility or eHealth, but can now paralyze an entire country, as the incidents in Cambodia have shown.

Cybercrime is on the rise! Every year, more and more incidents are registered and with attacks becoming more complex and devastating, it is becoming even harder for organizations to keep up with cybercriminals. The damages caused by a cyber attack goes far beyond revenue loss.

Cybercrime on the rise: Average attack volumes grew by 194%, and hyper-scale volumes by 150% year-on-year, shows Link11’s Q4 2018 DDoS statistics

Organizations get hit by DDoS attacks all the time. Becoming the victim of an attack is still often considered a taboo subject and the number of unreported cases is high. There are, however, incidents made public every now and then showing the devastating power of cyber-attacks and why a comprehensive protection is so important.