Recently, Arbor Networks, the company that helps secure the world's largest enterprise and service provider networks from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and advanced threats, was invited to collaborate on the whitepaper "The Zettabyte Era: Trends and Analysis", by the worldwide leaders in technology, Cisco.

"Cisco highlighted a number of interesting trends and did a great job of putting DDoS attacks into the perspective of global network traffic. Based on data provided by Arbor, the paper noted that the frequency of DDoS attacks has increased more than 2.5 times over the last three years," says Gary Sockrider, principal security technologist at Arbor Networks. "Interestingly, that rate of increase is roughly the same as global network traffic, according to Cisco. Further, it observed that DDoS attacks can represent up to 10 percent of a country's total Internet traffic while they are occurring."

Bryan Hamman, territory manager for sub-Saharan Africa at Arbor Networks adds: "With the current rate of DDoS attacks across the world, Africa certainly not excluded, we are witnessing attackers exploit numerous vulnerable Internet resources to carry out an attack, resulting in the stats sadly being expected."

"Unfortunately," continues Sockrider, "There continues to be no shortage of exploitable resources available on the Internet that can be brought to bear for these attacks. Cisco also noted the growth of the Internet of Everything (IoE) and spread of vulnerable devices as a contributing factor."

While DDoS attacks grew 25 percent in 2015, Cisco further projected that the number will increase 2.6-fold to 17 million by 2020.

"The threat of DDoS is clearly becoming ever more ubiquitous and attackers continue to ramp up in both scale and frequency. This has implications for all network operators around the globe in different ways," explains Sockrider. "For service providers, DDoS mitigation capabilities are imperative to not only to maintain a healthy network but also for their customers service assurance. For enterprise networks, the threat is just as ominous as they are more frequently the targets of these attacks. As Cisco noted, the two of the top three motivations for DDoS attacks are now criminal in nature. Enterprises need to ensure they are protected not only by their upstream providers, but also in the cloud and on their own networks, where stealthy application layer attacks can avoid detection until it's too late."