DDoS attacks real problem in 2014, attacks have accelerated in terms of size and volume in the third quarter of 2014

Published: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 by Rad

DDoS attacks real problem in 2014, attacks have accelerated in terms of size and volume in the third quarter of 2014. Compared to last year, this quarter saw a 389 per cent increase in average attack bandwidth, a 366 per cent increase in average peak packets per second, a 43 per cent increase in infrastructure layer attacks and a 22 per cent overall increase in DDoS attacks.

"In the third quarter alone, Akamai mitigated 17 attacks greater than 100 gigabits-per-second, with the largest at 321 Gbps," he said.

"These mega-attacks each used multiple DDoS vectors to deliver large bandwidth-consuming packets at an extremely high rate of speed."

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The report found a brute force approach characterised the most significant campaigns as attackers shifted towards new attack methods and enhanced older attack methods to consume more bandwidth.

The quarter also saw an increase in average peak packets per second, recording a 10 per cent increase over the previous quarter and a four-fold increase compared the same quarter in 2013. Malicious actors have found ways to involve a wider base of devices to expand DDoS botnets and produce larger DDoS attacks.

Attackers have also expanded to a new class of device including smartphones and embedded devices, such as customer-premises equipment (CPE), home cable modems, mobile devices, and a great variety of Internet-enabled devices including home-based and wearables within the category of the Internet of Things (IoT). Attacks with both high bandwidth and high volume were made possible by the use of multi-vector attack methods.

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