Prolexic has released its Quarterly Global DDOS Attack Report

Apr 17, 2013 15:10 GMT  ·  By

Distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) protection services provider Prolexic has released its Quarterly Global DDOS Attack Report for the first quarter of 2013. The numbers are not encouraging at all.

According to the company, the average bandwidth of DDOS attacks has increased by 718% compared to the previous quarter. The average packet-per-second rate has reached 32.4 million.

Compared to the first quarter of 2012, average attack bandwidth has increased by 681%, from 6.1 Gbps to 48.25 Gbps.

“Average packet-per-second rate and average bit rate spiked in the first quarter and both are growing at a fast clip,” explained Stuart Scholly, president at Prolexic.

“When you have average – not peak – rates in excess of 45 Gbps and 30 million packets-per-second, even the largest enterprises, carriers, and quite frankly most mitigation providers, are going to face significant challenges.”

Over the past period, cybercriminals have begun to understand that the secret to success lies in high packet-per-second DDoS attacks, ones that are specifically designed to overwhelm routers and other infrastructure components.

“It’s a classic change up,” Scholly noted. “Nearly everyone has been focused on bandwidth and gigabits per second, but it’s the packet rate that’s causing the most damage and presenting the biggest challenge. These packet rates are above the thresholds of all but the most expensive routers and line cards and we are seeing networks buckle as a result.”

The report also shows that over 10% of the DDOS attacks aimed at the company’s customers averaged at 60 Gbps. However, the largest attack mitigated by the company peaked at a whopping 130 Gbps.

The volume of attacks has also recorded an increase. According to Prolexic, the company witnessed the highest number of attacks for one quarter.

The complete Prolexic Q1 2013 Global DDoS Attack Report is available for download here (registration required).