Security News > 2022 > February > Carpet bombing DDoS attacks spiralled in 2021

Neustar Security Services has released a report which details the ongoing rise in cyberattacks in 2021, with an unprecedented number of carpet bombing distributed denial of service attacks.

Carpet bombing, in which a DDoS attack targets multiple IP addresses of an organization within a very short time, accounted for 44% of total attacks last year, but the disparity between the first and second half of 2021 was stark.

While carpet bombing represented 34% of total attacks mitigated in both Q1 and Q2, these attacks saw a big jump in the second half - representing 60% of all attacks in Q3, and 56% in Q4. While the vast majority of attacks fell into the 25 gigabits per second and under size category, and the average attack was just 4.9 Gbps last year, 2021 saw many large-scale attacks as well.

Single vector attacks represented 54% of attacks in 2021 compared to 5% in 2020, showing an economy of effort from many attackers.

Common threats to DNS include attacks that deliver a bad answer to DNS queries, attacks that prevent the DNS from answering queries and attacks that use DNS as a transport mechanism to convey information through firewalls.

The most common types of DNS attacks were DNS hijacking, followed closely by DNS flood, reflection/amplification or other type of DDoS attack, DNS tunneling and cache poisoning.

News URL

https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/02/22/carpet-bombing-ddos-2021/