Global cyber-security market to rise to $870 million by 2017

The global cyber-security solutions market is likely to increase to $870 million by 2017, according to research firm IDC.

The company said in a report, cyber-criminals used thousands of networked computers (botnets) to 'jam' a website bombarding it with very high traffic making it crash.

Attacks of the kind are termed as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and IDC said leading financial firms and other organisations had experienced a sharp increase in frequency, volume and orientation of such on their websites.

"As attacks surged in prevalence and sophistication, organisations were often caught unaware. Embedded capabilities were quickly overwhelmed and outages were readily apparent on the Web," IDC vice president (security products and services research) Christian Christiansen said in a statement.

"The worldwide market for DDoS prevention solutions will grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.2 percent from 2012 through 2017 and reach USD 870 million," it added.

DDoS attacks could have additional targets with the expansion of cloud services and mobile networks and while firewalls, intrusion protection and other devices could mitigate low-level attacks, large volumetric attacks could still pose an issue as these may be unable to separate legitimate from illegitimate traffic.

According to security solutions provider Symantec, in the late 1990s, websites were rendered unusable for customers, often preventing e-commerce using networks of zombie machines.

Networks of `zombie' computers were flourishing across the world, and India was one of the most-infected countries, the report said.

According to last year's Symantec Internet Security Threat Report XVII around 25 per cent of bot-infected computers in India were located in tier-II cities.

Symantec said while organisations needed to engage with their Internet Service Provider (ISP) and invest in solutions, consumers also needed to ensure that their security solution was updated to prevent such attacks.

According to IDC, the worldwide market for DDoS prevention solutions (including products and services) would grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.2 per cent from 2012 through 2017 and reach $870 million.

The report projects volumetric attacks would remain the predominant type of DDoS attacks throughout the forecast period, as these simple but devastating attacks were exceedingly effective due to the relative ease with which botnets could send bandwidth flood that could cripple most enterprise infrastructures.

Though volumetric-based attacks would remain most popular, more advanced hybrid attacks that included application layer and encrypted traffic would grow, driving growth in the on-premise equipment market throughout the forecast period.

According to John Grady, research manager for IDC's Security Products programme, with the number of high-profile attacks steadily increasing, the market for DDoS prevention solutions would surge.

He added, a defence-in-depth posture with a combination of on-premise equipment and cloud-based mitigation provided the best protection against advanced application and SSL-based attacks as also large-scale volumetric attacks.

Meanwhile, Spamhaus, which operates a filtering service used to weed out spam emails, had been under attack since 18 March after it added a hosting organisation called Cyberbunker to its list of unwelcome internet sites. According to one expert, the service had "made plenty of enemies", and the cyber-attack appeared to be retaliation (See: Russian hackers blamed for cyber attack that slowed the net: expert).

According to James Blessing, a member of the UK Internet Service Providers' Association (ISPA) council, a collateral effect of the attack was that internet users accustomed to high-speed connections may have seen those slow down.