DNS attacks increasingly target service providers

DNS attacks increasingly target service providers

The telecommunications and media sector is the most frequent victim of DNS attacks, according to EfficientIP.



DNS attacks on service providers


According to the IDC 2020 Global DNS Threat Report, organizations in the sector experienced an average of 11.4 attacks last year, compared to 9.5 attacks across industries.


Overall, 83% of service provider organizations experienced a DNS attack. In addition to being well above the overall average of 79%, a successful attack on telecommunications providers can have especially far reaching consequences as outages may affect customers in a wide variety of sectors relying on 24/7 availability of networks.


As well as a high attack frequency, telecommunications providers also tended to experience costlier attacks with over 8% of organizations stating that they had suffered damage costs of over $5 million as a result of a DNS attack.


Most common attack types


The most common attack types used by hackers were phishing attacks (37%), DNS-based malware (33%), DDoS attacks (27%), lock-up domain attacks (22%), which may cause DNS resolvers to exhaust their resources, as well as DNS amplification attacks (21%) which can result in the break-down of company networks potentially causing serious economic damages and disruptions.


Successful DNS attacks commonly resulted in in-house application downtime, experienced by 60% of organizations and cloud service downtime, which was reported by 54% of telcos surveyed.


As previous outages have shown, service disruptions can result in both severe brand damage and customer churn as dissatisfied subscribers of telecommunications providers may switch to competitors with a more reliable network.


The report indicates that 25% of providers experienced brand damage while 31% reported a loss of business. Lastly, for 18% of telcos, DNS attacks resulted in the theft of ..

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