Keep Your Front Door Open to the Customers Who Matter.

The impact of a DDoS attack can extend far beyond a website being temporarily unavailable. A significant denial-of-service attack is estimated to cost a UK organisation nearly £100,000 on average.[1].

That potential cost sits against a growing threat. UK targets experienced the equivalent of around 600 DDoS attacks every day during the first half of 2025,[2] while 20.5 million attacks were blocked globally in the first three months alone - a 358% year-on-year increase.[3] By the final quarter, the UK was the sixth most-targeted location globally.[4]

Once associated mainly with governments and global brands, DDoS now belongs in the wider business conversation. Cheaper, more accessible attack tools put organisations of every size at risk.

What is a DDoS attack?

Picture a busy venue with a bouncer controlling the entrance. Genuine customers arrive and the queue moves steadily. Now imagine thousands - or millions - of fake customers arriving at once. They crowd the entrance, overwhelm the bouncer and prevent genuine customers from getting through. The venue is still there, but it can no longer serve them.

This is essentially how a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack works. Attackers use large numbers of compromised devices to send malicious traffic or requests to a website, application, server or internet connection. Because that traffic comes from many sources simultaneously, it is harder to identify and block.

As capacity is consumed, legitimate requests are crowded out and services become slow, unreliable or unavailable. Unlike attacks designed to steal information, the immediate purpose of DDoS is disruption.

DDoS has changed

Modern attacks are increasingly automated, easier to launch and capable of reaching extreme levels within seconds. Botnets such as Aisuru - networks of malware-infected devices controlled remotely - can flood a target before a person has time to respond. Manual intervention is no longer a credible defence.

Size is only part of the threat. Attackers can combine network floods with techniques designed to exhaust specific resources. Even without a complete outage, delays and intermittent failures can frustrate customers, interrupt operations and undermine confidence.

Why this matters to SMEs

For SMEs, the consequences can extend far beyond the initial disruption. Revenue can stop when customers cannot transact. Employees lose time when cloud applications, communications or remote-access services become unavailable. Service teams face extra pressure, contractual obligations may be missed and customers simply see a business that is unavailable when they need it.

Trust can take longer to restore than the service itself. For a business competing on responsiveness, reliability or digital convenience, repeated disruption can damage a reputation that took years to build.

If your business depends on being online, the question is no longer simply whether your systems are secure. It is whether the business can continue operating when its digital front door is overwhelmed.

Preparedness starts with the right questionsr

The answer is not panic. It is preparation.

Business leaders do not need to become DDoS specialists, but they should know which internet-facing services are critical, what an hour of disruption could cost, who takes ownership during an attack and whether current protection has been tested against the way attacks operate today.

Traditional firewalls and standard hosting remain important, but they are not automatically a substitute for dedicated DDoS protection. Effective defence must identify abnormal traffic quickly, filter malicious requests and preserve access for genuine users before infrastructure is overwhelmed.

Protecting the digital front door

Securus Shield establishes a baseline of normal network activity and continually evaluates live traffic for unusual patterns.

Think of it like airport security. Thousands of legitimate passengers need to move through efficiently, while anything suspicious must be identified and stopped before it causes disruption. When malicious activity is detected, Securus Shield responds within seconds, filtering traffic through Securus routers in real time.

This happens at the network edge, before the attack can overwhelm the service provider's infrastructure or the customer's equipment. If the attack changes, the system adapts its response. For larger volumetric attacks, traffic can be redirected through a cloud-based scrubbing centre, where malicious activity is removed and clean traffic continues to its destination.

The objective is straightforward: stop hostile traffic while keeping the digital front door open to genuine customers and employees.

The right response is not panic. It is preparedness

Sources

[1] Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and KPMG, Economic modelling of sector specific costings of cyber attacks (April 2025), p. 6. The report estimates £97,560 for a significant DoS attack and notes that the model is based predominantly on underlying US data converted to UK pounds using purchasing power parity.

[2] NETSCOUT, DDoS Threat Intelligence Report: United Kingdom, first half of 2025.

[3] Cloudflare, DDoS Threat Report for 2025 Q1.

[4] Cloudflare Radar, DDoS Threat Report for 2025 Q4.