Security News
DDoS attacks have dominated the charts in terms of frequency, sophistication, and geo-distribution over the last year. While there are no signs of DDoS attacks going away anytime soon, how do organizations ensure that their Internet assets are protected against threats of any size or kind?
Several variants of the Gafgyt Linux-based botnet malware family have incorporated code from the infamous Mirai botnet, researchers have discovered. Gafgyt is a botnet that was first uncovered in 2014.
Cybersecurity firm NETSCOUT has released a new report detailing the state of DDoS attacks during the past year and it leads with an unfortunate new statistic: 2020 was the first year that the number of observed DDoS attacks crossed the 10-million mark. The most DDoS attacks recorded in a single month hit a new high at 929,000, and average DDoS attacks per month topped 2019 averages by between 100,000 and 150,000.
Netscout announced findings from its bi-annual Threat Intelligence Report, punctuated by a record-setting 10,089,687 DDoS attacks observed during 2020. Attackers paid particular attention to vital pandemic industries such as e-commerce, streaming services, online learning, and healthcare generating a 20% year-over-year increase in attack frequency over 2019 plus a 22% increase in the last six months of 2020.
Internet security services company Akamai has already dealt with the largest known ransom DDoS attack, which was also more complex than previously seen incidents of the same type. Bigger, more complex RDDoS. Akamai says that in February they dealt with "Three of the six biggest volumetric DDoS attacks" the company has ever recorded.
The recently observed assaults haven't reached the magnitude of the largest DDoS attacks the company has mitigated to date, which have peaked at 1.35 Tbps in 2018 and at 1.44 Tbps in 2020, but three of them are among the six biggest volumetric DDoS attacks Akamai has ever encountered. Akamai says the increased number of bigger volumetric DDoS attacks is the new norm.
We're only three months into 2021, and Akamai has mitigated 3 out of the 6 largest DDoS attacks they have ever witnessed. Hoping for a major Bitcoin payout, DDoS attackers continue to raise the bar when it comes to attack size, frequency, and target diversification.
Two high-ranked Apex Legends players have been banned from the platform for cheating by launching distributed denial-of-service attacks on an Xbox server. Top ranked 'Apex Legends' players banned over DDoS attack on Xbox.
DDoS-for-hire services are now actively abusing misconfigured or out-of-date Datagram Transport Layer Security servers to amplify Distributed Denial of Service attacks. According to reports that surfaced in December, a DDOS attack used DTLS to amplify traffic from vulnerable Citrix ADC devices that used DTLS configurations without a 'HelloClientVerify' anti-spoofing mechanism designed to block such abuse.
DDoS attacks reached a record high during the pandemic as cybercriminals launched new and increasingly complex attacks, a Link11 report reveals. The analysis showed a boom in DDoS attacks that were closely linked to the pandemic.