Telia Carrier's recent research revealed alarming statistics concerning the rise in DDoS cyberattacks

Jul 23, 2021 19:20 GMT  ·  By

The findings of recent research into the security risks associated with Internet traffic were published by Telia Carrier recently. The statistics are extremely alarming, as they reveal that DDoS attacks surged by 50%, according to Help Net Security.  

The difference is significant: 1.18 Tb (Terabytes) per second, or 887 Megabits per second (Mpps) (Mega Packets Per Second). Last year alone, a whopping 57 Petabits of malicious information was cleaned, and the average size of a DDoS attack was 19 Gbps, with an average duration of 10 minutes.

Jorg Dekker, Head of Internet Services at Telia Carrier said “The rise of carpet bombing as a popular attack vector and a dramatic increase in peak attack traffic are two important reasons why organizations need to move to automatic threat mitigation techniques”. He added that it is increasingly common for cybercriminals to exploit the massive bandwidth available on the Internet to attack their victims with lightning speed and ferocity from multiple launch sites simultaneously.

To counter these dynamic and unpredictable attacks that are meticulously planned and automated, ISPs must respond by investing in auto-mitigation technologies as they are shifting away from static traffic inspection and mitigation.

The primary findings of the DDoS cyber attack analysis

A noticeable trend has been observed in the ever-increasing coordinated attacks from numerous sources on dynamically changing hosts in a target network. This type of attack used to be observed in severe but isolated cases, but nowadays they are more persistent and protracted. Significant spring and fall blockages in the U.S. and Europe were found to be reflected in attack traffic.

With respect to DNS and NTP amplification attacks, the most frequent attacks were carried out in 2020. These types of attacks are stronger and more frequent. Increasing the overall network capacity means that threat actors are launching more aggressive attacks against more victims, rather than just overloading customer connections.