Hacker motivations differ between US and UK businesses

According to a study over 30% of organisations have experienced one or more Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in the past year.

The study commissioned by Corero Network Security, interviewed 300 IT directors from medium and large sized companies and revealed that US Companies were twice as likely to have experienced a DDoS attack than their UK counterparts.

The concern of suffering from a DDoS attack was less among UK IT directors than US directors, with 63% of US IT directors expressing concern compared to only 29% in the UK.

In the UK, over 50% of retail companies reported the highest level of concern about DDoS attacks; followed by financial organisations with 28%, manufacturing with 11% and commercial sectionrs with 7%.

US companies were shown to be more aware and worried about DDoS attacks than UK Companies as nearly 38% had suffered an attack than just 18% among UK companies.

Among UK companies, it was reported that political or ideological motivation was the main source of DDoS attacks on websites. A third of the UK companies surveyed blamed "hacktivist" groups like Anonymous, for these attacks. However, political or ideological reasons were found to be the main reasons for businesses in the finance sector and not in retail, manufacturing, or commercial sectors.

Member of Anonymous

"DDoS is a major, growing and evolving threat to global Internet commerce," said Andrew Miller, chief operating officer at Corero Network Security plc in the UK. "High-profile ideologically motivated attacks by groups such as Anonymous have raised awareness of 'hacktivist'-based DDoS attacks, but any enterprise may fall victim to unscrupulous competitors or cyber criminals."

Over 50% of U.S companies in the study said unprincipled competitors were the main culprits for DDoS attacks with only 20%of UK Companies citing this as the main cause for attacks.

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