• by Ray Schultz , June 11, 2018

European companies — now the most regulated in the world when it comes to privacy — are most likely to suffer domain-name system attacks, with 77% reporting them in the past year, according to a new study by EfficientIP. Many were delivered by phishing emails. 

The cost of these DNS attacks rose by 43% in that period to hit an average of €734,000. French firms suffered the most, with an average cost of €847,000, but the biggest increase belonged to the UK — 105% to €684,000.

French firms also experienced the most data theft, at 48%. In contrast, UK companies had the least in the region, at 32%. The global average is 33%.

In addition, 33% of European firms said their websites were compromised, with 48% of Spanish companies saying they suffered downtime. 

However, Euro organizations lead the world in protecting their cloud services, with only 34% reporting cloud downtime, compared with the 40% global average.

France, however, came in above that average, at 41%.  Germany was the lowest, at 28%.

These attacks came in the form of malware (39%), phishing emails (34%), DNS DdoS (20%, DNS tunneling (19%), and domain lock-up (18%).

Germany faced the most DNS-based malware attacks, at 44% — a global high. Spanish firms led DNS tunneling attacks, at 24%.

Companies are fighting these incursions by investing in the securing of network endpoints (38%), monitoring and analysis of DNS traffic (36%) and firewalls (20%).

“Surprisingly, our research shows European organizations have invested the least globally in technology, which can prevent data theft,” states David Williamson, CEO of EfficientIP. “This could be a reason as to why the region had the most data stolen.”

He adds: “In the year ahead, it will be interesting to see how European companies will prevent data theft and avoid regulatory fines.”