South African organisations are more concerned about disruptive cyber attacks than their global counterparts.

This is according to a global study from UK headquartered communications provider BT.

The research was conducted in May 2014 and involved 640 interviews with IT decision makers in medium to large sized organisations across eleven countries and regions: the UK, France, Germany, USA, Spain, Brazil, Middle East, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Africa and Australia.

The IT decision makers work in sectors ranging from finance, retail and government.

And the study reveals that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks; in particular, are are a key concern for two-thirds of South African organisations (66%): higher than the global average (58%).

“In South Africa, the vast majority of IT decision makers (83%) admit that
DDoS attacks have brought down their systems for more than six hours – almost a full working day,” says BT in a press statement.

The study goes on to note that 16% of South African respondents said they suffered DDoS attacks in the last 12 months.

The research also adds that only 10% of respondents in South Africa said their CEOs have a good understanding of what a DDoS attack is.

“DDoS attacks can cause major disruption for organisations; they can take down an organisation’s website, overwhelm a datacentre or generally cause networks to grind to a halt and become unusable. They are also increasingly becoming more complex and difficult for organisations to fend off,” says BT.

Meanwhile, DDoS attacks are becoming more of a headache for other global organisations as well.

The BT research claims that 41% of organisations globally were hit by DDoS attacks over the past year, with three quarters of those (78%) targeted twice or more in the year.