DDoS and Extortion: The Evolution

Richard Meeus of NSFOCUS on Responding to More Powerful Strikes Information Security Media Group • December 9, 2016

Over the past two years, distributed denial-of-service attacks have grown in strength and in purpose - they now are often used as a tool of extortion, says Richard Meeus of security vendor NSFOCUS. How should security leaders prepare to respond to these strikes?

"We are now seeing our fourth generation of DDoS attacks," says Meeus, vice president of technology for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at NSFOCUS. "What this means is using the internet of things - all those devices ... that are being manipulated to launch huge attacks."

Meeus compares DDoS to a street corner mugging. "It's quite a blunt tool, but it's incredibly effective because it can take your entire organization offline," he says. "That doesn't mean just taking your website offline, but it means taking your email offline, your B2B, your B2C and any interaction you have with the outside digital world."

In a video interview at Information Security Media Group's recent London Fraud and Breach Prevention Summit, Meeus discusses:

Characteristics of today's strongest DDoS and extortion attacks;
The value of an intelligent hybrid security approach;
How NSFOCUS is helping global customers defend against DDoS and extortion attacks.

Meeus brings to NSFOCUS IB more than 10 years of experience in both appliance and cloud-based services. In addition to evangelizing the NSFOCUS brand and products and integrating products and services on both a global basis and within EMEA, he is also responsible for leading the pre-sales team. Previously, Meeus was at Akamai for more than two years, where he led the security pre-sales team for EMEA and dealt primarily with cloud-based DDOS and WAF services. In addition, he has held senior engineering and technical sales positions at Prolexic, CriticalPath and Mirapoint Software.