{"id":27617,"date":"2026-04-17T09:00:44","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T07:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/smecyberinsights.co.uk\/?p=27617"},"modified":"2026-04-30T11:20:06","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T09:20:06","slug":"ddos-attacksagainst-uk-smes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smecyberinsights.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/04\/17\/ddos-attacksagainst-uk-smes\/","title":{"rendered":"DDoS Attacks Against UK SMEs: Securus CEO Brett Rowe explains why \u201cToo Small to Target\u201d Is a Myth"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Gibraltar:\u00a0 Friday, 17 April 2026 \u2013 09:00 CET<\/p>\n

DDoS Attacks Against UK SMEs: Securus CEO Brett Rowe explains why \u201cToo Small to Target\u201d Is Now a Dangerous Myth
\n<\/strong>By Brett Rowe \u2013 CEO <\/a>Securus Technology Group\u00a0<\/a>
\n<\/a>SMECyberInsights.co.uk<\/a>\u00a0– First for SME Cybersecurity
\n<\/a>Google Indexed on: 170426 at 10:35 CET<\/a>
\n#SMECyberInsights #SMECybersecurity #SMECyberInsights #SME #CyberSafe #CyberSecurity #DDOSProtection #UKSMEs #CyberResilience #ManagedSecurity #SecurusCommunications<\/em><\/p>\n

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For years, many UK SMEs have reassured themselves with a simple phrase: \u201cWe\u2019re too small to be a target.\u201d It feels comforting, and on the surface, it is even plausible. Why would attackers waste their time on a regional law firm, a specialist manufacturer, a hospitality group, or a college when there are global brands to aim at?<\/p>\n

The reality, especially in the DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) world, is very different.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When attackers launch DDoS campaigns, they are not looking up your Companies House filings before pressing the button. They are using large botnets, automated tools and opportunistic targeting. If your services are online and important to your customers \u2013 booking engines, payment portals, VPNs, remote desktop, web apps \u2013 then you are part of the blast radius.<\/p>\n

As a result, \u201ctoo small to target\u201d has quietly become one of the most dangerous myths in SME cyber security.<\/p>\n

This is exactly the problem Securus Technology Group built its DDoS protection service, Securus Shield, to address.<\/p>\n

What a DDoS Attack Actually Is \u2013 in Plain English<\/strong><\/p>\n

A DDoS attack is a way of knocking a service offline by overwhelming it with traffic. Instead of trying to \u201chack in\u201d, the attacker simply makes it impossible for legitimate users to get through.<\/p>\n

There are two broad types that matter to SMEs:<\/p>\n

* Volumetric attacks: these are like opening a fire hydrant into a garden hose. The attacker floods your internet connection or upstream network with so much traffic that nothing else can get through. Legitimate requests queue up, time out, or never arrive.<\/p>\n

* Application\u2011layer attacks: here, the attacker sends what looks like normal web traffic \u2013 for example, lots of HTTP requests to your website or booking engine \u2013 but in such a way that the server becomes overwhelmed. It is more \u201csurgical\u201d than a raw bandwidth flood, but the outcome is similar: real users see slow pages, errors or a complete outage.<\/p>\n

Both approaches typically use a botnet: thousands of compromised machines and IoT devices scattered across the internet, all sending traffic at once on command.<\/p>\n

From the attacker\u2019s perspective, your size is irrelevant. What matters is that:<\/p>\n

* you have something online; and
\n* taking it down causes pain, visibility, or leverage.<\/p>\n

Why UK SMEs Are Now Squarely in the Blast Radius<\/strong><\/p>\n

Historically, DDoS was often associated with large gaming platforms, global banks or political targets. Those are still hit, but three trends have dragged SMEs into the same storm.<\/p>\n

First, there is far more automation. Attackers do not manually hand\u2011pick every victim. They scan for exposed services, weak protections and known targets (like specific web platforms, VPNs or remote access systems). If your business runs the same technology stack as a larger one, you can be swept up in the same campaign.<\/p>\n

Second, DDoS is cheap. \u201cDDoS\u2011for\u2011hire\u201d services mean that anyone with a modest budget \u2013 a disgruntled ex\u2011employee, a competitor with poor ethics, a student with a grudge \u2013 can rent a botnet for an hour or a weekend. SMEs are attractive because they often lack sophisticated defences, so a small outlay can cause significant disruption.<\/p>\n

Third, geopolitics has become a backdrop. As we have seen in conflicts involving Russia, Iran and others, politically motivated groups are happy to hit a mixture of primary targets and collateral ones. They go after shared infrastructure, specific industries and widely used hosting providers. SMEs can be impacted because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time on the internet.<\/p>\n

If your customer portal, booking site, VPN gateway or web application lives in that shared ecosystem, you are exposed \u2013 whether or not an attacker can spell your company name.<\/p>\n

Real\u2011World SME Scenarios: Where DDoS Actually Hurts<\/strong><\/p>\n

It can be tempting to think of DDoS as an abstract \u201cIT problem\u201d. For most SMEs, it is a very tangible business problem. A few familiar scenarios:<\/p>\n

* Hospitality and leisure<\/strong><\/p>\n

* A hotel or venue relies on an online booking engine and gift voucher site. A flood of traffic makes both unreachable on a Friday afternoon. Guests cannot book; vouchers cannot be redeemed. The team scrambles to handle calls manually. Week\u2011end revenue drops, and the brand looks unreliable.<\/p>\n

*Professional services
\n<\/strong>A law firm or accountancy practice offers a client portal for document sharing and case updates. A DDoS against the hosting provider makes access intermittent. Clients trying to upload time\u2011critical documents encounter errors and delays. From their perspective, the firm looks disorganised and insecure, even if no data has been compromised.<\/p>\n

* Education
\n<\/strong>A college has remote access and learning platforms for students and staff. In exam season, a DDoS attack aimed at \u201cmaking a point\u201d takes the main access point down. Teaching is disrupted, and the organisation suddenly finds itself talking to regulators and anxious parents.<\/p>\n

* Manufacturing and distribution
\n<\/strong>A specialist manufacturer runs a web portal for orders and a VPN for remote access to key systems. A DDoS incident ties up its internet connection. Orders cannot be placed; remote sites cannot connect; or, in a more subtle case, performance becomes so poor that operations slow to a crawl.<\/p>\n

In all of these cases, the damage is disproportionately large compared to the effort an attacker expends.<\/p>\n

The Economics: Downtime vs Protection<\/strong><\/p>\n

Boards and finance teams quite reasonably ask, \u201cWhat is the business case?\u201d<\/p>\n

A sensible way to think about DDoS protection is through three lenses:<\/p>\n

*Direct revenue impact
\n<\/strong>How much revenue flows through online channels per hour or per day? You do not need to be an e\u2011commerce giant for the numbers to be uncomfortable. A hospitality group losing a weekend of online bookings, a manufacturer unable to accept orders, or a professional services firm with a key client tender portal offline can see significant losses quickly.<\/p>\n

* Contractual and reputational damage
\n<\/strong>Many organisations now work under SLAs with uptime expectations. Repeated outages \u2013 even if caused by third\u2011party attacks \u2013 can erode trust and raise awkward questions. Clients often do not distinguish between \u201cour systems broke\u201d and \u201cour provider was attacked\u201d; they just see that you were unavailable.<\/p>\n

* Recovery cost and internal disruption
\n<\/strong>DDoS incidents consume internal time: IT staff firefighting, leadership answering calls, service teams handling complaints. In some cases, emergency workarounds and infrastructure changes are rushed through under pressure, introducing new risks.<\/p>\n

Against that, the cost of a properly designed, managed DDoS protection service \u2013 especially one integrated with your connectivity and firewall \u2013 is usually modest. It becomes part of the cost of doing business online reliably, rather than a luxury.<\/p>\n

Why On\u2011Premise Firewalls Alone Are Not Enough<\/strong><\/p>\n

A common misunderstanding is that \u201cwe have a firewall, so we are covered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Firewalls are essential, but they were not designed to absorb huge amounts of unwanted traffic. In fact, they can become part of the problem during a DDoS attack:<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0The internet connection saturates before the firewall can decide what to allow or block.
\n\u2022 The firewall itself becomes overwhelmed trying to inspect and handle the flood.
\n\u2022 Legitimate traffic to other services using the same connection is squeezed out.<\/p>\n

Effective DDoS mitigation generally needs to happen upstream, before the bad traffic reaches your line. That means diverting traffic through specialised \u201cscrubbing\u201d infrastructure on a high\u2011capacity network that can:<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0detect attack patterns;
\n\u2022 filter or rate\u2011limit malicious flows; and
\n\u2022 pass only clean traffic back to your actual connection.<\/p>\n

This is the model Securus Communications has built into Securus Shield.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Securus Shield: DDoS Protection Designed for Organisations That Cannot Afford to Go Offline<\/strong><\/p>\n

Securus Shield is Securus Communications\u2019 managed DDoS protection service, built on top of the company\u2019s own high\u2011capacity UK core network.<\/p>\n

Instead of bolting a third\u2011party service onto an already fragile setup, Securus starts from the network and works upward:<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0Traffic to your protected services is routed through the Securus core network.
\n\u2022 During normal operation, this happens quietly in the background, adding minimal overhead.
\n\u2022 When a DDoS attack begins, Securus Shield\u2019s detection mechanisms identify the abnormal patterns.
\n\u2022 Malicious traffic is diverted to scrubbing infrastructure within the Securus network, where it is filtered and cleaned.
\n\u2022 Legitimate traffic is forwarded on to your systems; malicious flows are dropped or rate\u2011limited upstream.<\/p>\n

From the client perspective, the critical difference is who absorbs the pain. Instead of your single broadband line or leased circuit trying to swallow the entire attack, Securus\u2019 backbone does the heavy lifting.<\/p>\n

Equally important is the human element. Securus\u2019 UK\u2011based team monitor, tune and explain what is happening in plain English. That echoes Securus\u2019 wider approach: service\u2011led, not product\u2011pushed; clear, human communication rather than jargon.<\/p>\n

Making DDoS Protection Part of a Wider Resilience Story<\/strong><\/p>\n

DDoS is only one facet of resilience, but it is one that interacts strongly with connectivity, firewalls, monitoring and recovery plans.<\/p>\n

For Securus clients, Securus Shield does not sit alone. It is integrated with:<\/p>\n

\u2022 Securus Connect services \u2013 resilient leased lines, business broadband and SD\u2011WAN\/SASE designs to avoid single points of failure.
\n\u2022 Managed Firewall \u2013 so firewall policies and configurations reflect the reality of how DDoS mitigation is handled.
\n\u2022 Managed Detection & Response (MDR) \u2013 so DDoS\u2011related events, anomalies and side\u2011effects are visible to the same team watching for other threats.
\n\u2022 Disaster Recovery and Private Cloud \u2013 so that if an upstream provider or platform is impacted, there are thought\u2011through options for maintaining service.<\/p>\n

For UK SMEs and mid\u2011market organisations, that integrated approach is often the difference between \u201cwe bought a DDoS product\u201d and \u201cwe can stay online during an incident\u201d.<\/p>\n

The myth of being \u201ctoo small to target\u201d is fading. The practical question now is: if your website, portal or remote access is the front door to your business, who is making sure it stays open when the wider internet becomes hostile?<\/p>\n

For Securus, the answer is clear: organisations that cannot afford to go offline need DDoS protection embedded into the network itself \u2013 not bolted on as an afterthought.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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SECURUS Communications Ltd<\/strong><\/p>\n

Securus<\/a> <\/strong>is a managed communications Operator, providing next-generation network infrastructure and value added services to Managed Hosting providers and the ‘cloud generation’\u200b of enterprises. Securus<\/a> <\/strong>priority is to offer communication services that represent excellent value for money and are backed by exceptional levels of support.<\/p>\n

Contact Securus<\/strong>
\nSecurus Communications Ltd
\nStation Road, Landmark house, Hook, England RG27 9HA, GB
\nT: Enquiries:\u00a003451 283457<\/span><\/a>\u00a0| Service Desk: 03451 283458<\/a>
\nSecurus on LinkedIn<\/a> | Securus on “X”<\/a> | https:\/\/securuscomms.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t

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