This piece is presented by SDN Communications.

SDN Communications detected more than 500 DDoS attacks on clients’ networks in just the first three months of 2017. The Distributed Denial of Service attacks’ average size was 1.27 gigabits per second, which is enough to potentially take down most online services temporarily.

The seemingly encouraging news is that SDN’s data shows that the attack volume in that time frame dropped 28 percent from the same quarter in 2016. However, that might be a deceptive quirk of timing, said Theron McChesney, business intelligence specialist at SDN.

“I don’t want that to give people a false sense of security,” McChesney said. “The threats are still out there, and they’re big enough to take down any internet connection.”

SDN’S managed firewall service flagged 28 percent of traffic to the devices during the first quarter as being malicious or unwanted and filtered it out. That’s more than one-fourth of all incoming traffic.

To help area businesses better grasp the cyberthreats they’re up against, SDN is offering a free, quarterly Cyber Threat Landscape Report. The company’s cyber experts just compiled data from Q1 of 2017 and released their findings.

Download the new report and watch an animated map that shows how DDoS attacks are targeting businesses in the region.