I believe the worst kind of cyber-attack is a DDoS attack. I believe this is the worst attack because it can substantially damage a company’s reputation, and can be extremely expensive to recover from. For instance,” Over 80 per cent of respondents from the world of financial services placed their losses at over £6,000 per hour and in retail, nearly 70 per cent of respondents say outages would hit them to the tune of £63,545 an hour, in excess of £1,270,890 a day” (Swearingen, 2009). Also, it is not that expensive or hard for an attacker to implement a DDOS attack. For example, “For as little as £43 per day, you can also rent a botnet, an adhoc computer network that can be used to amplify attacks” (Swearingen, 2009) “There are now over 50 different tools capable of mounting a successful DDoS attack, and new tools are being developed every day” (Swearingen, 2009).
It is common for a DDOS attack to be used against major banks. I found an article about how a DDoS was used to distract the banks from fraudulent activities. Usually this type of attack is meant for bringing down websites, which also still does a lot of damage to the reputation and revenue. However, this attack was different, and it was used to distract bank employees from the fraudulent behavior. After the attackers gained accessed to the banking systems, they were able to change the max amount of wire transfers, and were able to transfer a huge amount of transfers without being detected. They could have been caught, or at least the wire transfers could have been stopped, but the DDoS attack was distracting the bank employees. Furthermore, the damage of the attack could have been lessened if a there was a better response to the attack, for instance, "One rule that banks should institute is to slow down the money transfer system while under a DDoS attack", and "a layered fraud prevention and security approach is warranted" (Musil, 2013).
References
Musil, Steven. (2013). Cybercrooks use DDoS attacks to mask theft of banks' millions. CBS Interactive Inc. Web. Retrieved from http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57599646-83/cybercrooks-use-ddos-attacks-to-mask-theft-of-banks-millions/
Swearingen, Ted. (2009). The real cost of DDoS. SC Magazine. Web. Retrieved from http://www.scmagazineuk.com/the-real-cost-of-ddos/article/262680/