The eighth annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report from security provider Arbor Networks has revealed how cloud services and data centres are “increasingly victimised” by cyber attackers.

The report, which looked at a 12 month period ending September 2012, asked nearly 200 security-based questions to 130 respondents in the enterprise and network operator fields.

The key points of the research were:

• 94% of data centre operators reported security attacks
• 76% had suffered distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks towards their customers, whilst just under half (43%) had partial or total infrastructure outages due to DDoS
• Yet only 14% of respondents had seen attacks targeting any form of cloud service

The result of this was that “complex multi-vector attacks” – combinations of attack vectors intending to hack away at a company’s defences – were on the rise, with big security breaches becoming less common. To exemplify this, advanced persistent threats (APTs) were cited …