14 DAY TRIAL // A report regarding distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks informs that the number of incidents mitigated in the first three months of the year was above what was recorded in any quarter of 2014, most of them peaking above 1Gbps.
The data was pulled from the January 1 and March 31, 2015, period and compared to the previous quarter there were 7% more attacks, according to data gathered by Verisign.
DDoS is often used as a means of protest and their effect is congesting the target’s web resources and making it inaccessible; but it has also been employed as a diversion for serious breaches with a financial goal, and more commonly, for blackmailing.
Motivation for crippling the online activity of a target is also accounted by retaliation or the desire to gain advantage over competition by slowing down its activity.
Such services are cheap and can be rented by anyone. The price is generally set by the duration and amount of power needed by the customer.
Largest DDoS recorded mixed UDP-reflection and SYN flood
Verisign says that most of the attacks it mitigated in Q1 2015 were between 1 and 5Gbps, 19% more than in Q4 2014, which still represents significant bandwidth for many organizations.
The largest volumetric DDoS attack peaked at 54Gbps, with 18 million packets delivered every second to the victim’s system and it was directed at an IT Services/Cloud/SaaS customer.
It consisted in UDP-reflection via the Network Time Protocol (NTP) and the Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP). On top of this, lower volume SYN flood traffic was also directed to the target’s systems.
Kaspersky also released a report about DDoS attacks, focusing on incidents that involved botnets. According to its data, in Q1 2015 there were 11% less events compared to the previous three months.
Cloud and SaaS services were most frequently hit
Verisign’s data shows that its customers in the IT Services/Cloud/SaaS business were the most targeted, accounting to 34% of all attacks. Following with 18% are financial services and the public sector. Media and entertainment sector was hit with 12% of the attacks.
The company believes that the financial and public sector “benefited” from more attention because of political activism or hacktivism, as a “reaction to various well-publicized events throughout the quarter, including the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in Paris, France, and protests in Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and the United States.”
