Security News > 2021 > February > DDoS Attacks Wane in Q4 Amid Cryptomining Resurgence

"A surge in cryptocurrency costs may have prompted cybercriminals to re-profile some botnets so that the command-and-control servers typically used in DDoS attacks could repurpose infected devices and use their computing power to mine cryptocurrencies instead," researchers said.

DDoS of course didn't go away - as people spent more time online in 2020, researchers observed a corresponding spike in DDoS attacks for most of the year.

"The number of DDoS attacks was still 10 percent higher than the same period the year before, but overall reflected a declining trend, after attacks spiked dramatically in response to global lockdown measures earlier in the year," analysis explained.

The top attack types shifted significantly: "The share of UDP flooding was up; ICMP attacks were displaced by GRE flooding. In addition, for the first time in our observation history, Linux botnets have almost totally captured the DDoS market."

"The DDoS attack market is currently affected by two opposite trends," said Alexey Kiselev, business development manager on the Kaspersky DDoS Protection team.

"On the one hand, people still highly rely on stable work of online resources, which can make DDoS attacks a common choice for malefactors. However, with a spike in cryptocurrency prices, it may be more profitable for them to infect some devices with miners. As a result, we see that the total number of DDoS attacks in Q4 remained quite stable. And we can predict that this trend will continue in 2021.".

News URL

https://threatpost.com/ddos-attacks-q4-cryptomining-resurgence/163998/