Education sector is fastest growing for DDoS mitigation - DOSarrest

Schools and universities could be guarding themselves against their own students, says CTO Jag Bains

The education sector is the fastest growing segment in taking up distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, according to DDoS protection services firm DOSarrest.

The firm's CTO Jag Bains told Computing that many companies -not just e-commerce firms - are deploying DDoS protection.

"If their website goes down as a result of an attack, they can lose their SEO ranking or it could have an effect on their brand, there is a lot at stake aside from revenues," he said.

And despite there not being a particular industry that looks at DDoS protection as a must, DOSarrest's general manager, Mark Teolis claimed that the education sector is one area which has grown significantly.

"Our fastest growing segment in the last six months is the education sector believe it or not," he said.

Teolis explained that the firm was getting business from "schools from the UK, the US and international universities" but said he couldn't identify a specific reason as to why the sector has shown a sudden interest.

Bains believes that it may be as a result of educational institutes guarding themselves against their own students.

"Students have easy access to DDoS tools, so they may want to try it against their own [school or university]. They could be motivated because they're failing in something, and there are enough smart kids around to access tools - it is easy to Google them anyway," he said.

But Teolis said that the tools have been available on the internet for a long time, so questioned why there was a sudden surge in interest from educational institutes.

Bains suggested that it could be because the school and university websites have become an integral part of the education system.

"We've been talking about e-commerce and gaming [as being key industries for DDoS protection], but web presence itself is very important and schools and universities need to make their websites accessible. They need a website to give out grades, information and schedules - five years ago they weren't really using the web page apart from explaining where the school is located," he said.

But while the education sector may be taking a keen interest, Teolis claims that there is not one segment that is "taking up 30 per cent of the market". He said that "10 or 15 per cent of the market is as good as it gets".

As for a particular industry that has not taken DDoS as seriously as others, Teolis believes many e-commerce firms haven't contemplated being the victim of a DDoS attack.

"There are still the odd e-commerce guys out there [who haven't taken it as seriously]. Money is rolling in and they're just focused on that; DDoS for them is somebody else's problem. A lot of it is ‘my ISP will deal with it', the fact of the matter is, it is difficult to stop all of the attacks," he said.