Press release distribution giant Business Wire has been experiencing a directed and persistent distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack.
The company said that since last Wednesday, 31 January, the attack has been causing disruption to its newswire service portal and attempting to render it unavailable.
In a customer advisory, Richard DeLeo, COO of Business Wire, said the service's ability to disseminate its clients' content has not been affected in any way, and claimed there is no evidence that any systems or client information have been compromised.
He added that Business Wire's dedicated internal team is working closely with unnamed partners to mitigate and resolve the issue, and stabilise the environment, but didn't go into any detail, other than saying the attack was 'direct and persistent'.
15 attacks a year?
A10 Networks said this is unsurprising, as a recent A10 Networks report revealed that 42% of companies faced one to five DDOS attacks per year, and 32% over 25 attacks annually. Another 9% said they didn't know if they had been attacked or not.
This means the average company suffers 15 DDOS attacks per year, with an average attack causing at least 17 hours of effective downtime, including slowdowns, denied customer access or crashes.
In addition, it said attacks are also getting harder to defend against, with average peak bandwidths of 30 Gbps to 40 Gbps, and many exceeding that mark.
"When projected across the entire industry, this presents an ominous trend, as nearly half of IT professionals have either been a victim of a DDOS attack or don't know yet if they have been," the company added.
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