The cost of a DNS attack in Singapore increased over the past year from US$924,000 to $1.022 million, surpassing the global average of about $924,000, according to EfficientIP.
The company’s 2020 Global DNS Threat Report, done in collaboration with IDC, finds that while the average number of attacks and the associated costs have remained high, enterprise evolution and awareness of DNS security is growing.
Conducted from January to April 2020, the research covered 900 CISOs, CIOs, CTOs, IT managers, security managers and network managers who are based in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
Nearly four out of five (79%) organisations experienced DNS attacks an average of 9.5 incidents per year. There were 10.73 attacks for Singapore, and India with 12.13 attacks, the highest globally, against 10.44 for Asia as a region.
Among the countries surveyed for cost of attacks, Singapore has ranked in the top three, while Asia as a region has held fairly consistently.
Attackers appear to increasingly target the cloud. As the number of business-critical applications hosted in hybrid-cloud environments has increased, so has the attack surface for cybercriminals.
Findings shows that cloud service downtime downtime increased from 41% in 2019 to 50% in 2020, a sharp growth of nearly 22%. The increased adoption of cloud services during the global COVID-19 pandemic could make the cloud even more attractive for attackers.
In-house app downtime remained extremely high at 62% globally this year compared to 63% last year. As a whole, application downtime—whether in-house or in the cloud—remains the most significant result of DNS attacks with 82% saying that they had experienced application downtime of some kind.
This year phishing led in popularity (39% of companies experienced phishing attempts), malware-based attacks (21%), and traditional DDoS (27%). In terms of having sensitive customer information stolen, Singapore scored the highest globally at 30%, outpacing India (27%) and Asia (25%), as well as the global average of 16%.
Despite these worrying numbers, enterprise awareness of how to combat these attacks is improving — 77% of respondents deemed DNS security a critical component of their network architecture, compared to 64% in the previous year.
