The 'It won't happen to me' mentality is misplaced and complacent when it comes to cyberattacks that disrupt business operations – and many firms believe competitors are behind DDoS attacks. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks can happen to any company, whether they are the intended target or not. These highly damaging cyberattacks can cause service disruption through data encryption that halts company operations, by accessing confidential information and/or demanding a ransom. But more than a quarter of businesses that have experienced a DDoS attack said they don’t think they were the actual intended target. Kaspersky Lab's IT Security Risks annual survey found that 27 per cent of the 5,274 businesses analysed believed that a recent DDoS attack was not aimed at them. This suggests that “all businesses are in the firing line, even when they are not on the hit list”.

However, 28 per cent of companies are not protecting themselves from such attack, simply because they don't think they are likely to be targeted, according to Kaspersky Lab, the multinational cybersecurity and anti-virus protection software firm headquartered in Moscow. It says this complacency is misplaced. “A worryingly large proportion of businesses are still displaying an ‘it won’t happen to me' mentality towards DDoS attacks, which they simply can’t afford to do in today’s threat landscape,” said the company's Alexey Kiselev.

Research by the company shows that, of the companies that experienced a security incident within the last 12 months, 44 per cent blamed a DDoS attack as being a contributing factor to that incident – up from a quarter (25 per cent) in 2016.

Even more shocking is that nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of businesses believe a competitor was behind a DDoS attack on their organisation – most likely for espionage or disruption purposes; and 24 per cent believed it was used as a distraction tactic to hide another attack from IT staff, and 24 per cent believe that a DDoS attack was designed to specifically disrupt their operations.