14 DAY TRIAL // Distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) protection services provider Prolexic has released its report for the second quarter of 2013. Compared to the second quarter of 2012, the average attack bandwidth has increased by 925%, while packet-per-second (PPS) rates have increased by 1,655%.
More precisely, the average bandwidth has reached 49.24 Gbps, and the average PPS rate has reached 47.7 Mbps.
“This quarter we logged increases for all major DDoS attack metrics, and some have been significant. DDoS attacks are getting bigger, stronger and longer. We believe this growth is being fueled by the increasing prevalence of compromised Joomla and WordPress web servers in increasingly large botnets,” commented Stuart Scholly, president at Prolexic.
It’s worth noting that in Q2 2013 the average DDOS attack bandwidth is higher than the previous all-time high of 48.25 Gbps recorded in Q1 2013.
Compared to the previous quarter, the PPS rate has increased by 46%.
As far as attack durations are concerned, they’ve also increased over the past quarter to an average of 38 hours.
“Attack durations are likely increasing because perpetrators are less concerned about detection and protecting their botnets. The widespread availability of compromised web servers makes it much easier for malicious actors to replenish, grow and redeploy botnets,” Scholly added.
“Traditionally, botnets have been built from compromised clients. This requires malware distribution via PCs and virus infections, and takes considerable time and effort. Consequently, attackers wanted to protect their client-based botnets and were more fearful of detection, so we saw shorter attack durations.”
The total number of DDOS attacks launched in the past quarter increased by 33% compared to the same period of 2012.
When it comes to the origin of such attacks, China has been named the number one source country.
The complete report is available here (registration required).