Security News

DDoS attacks would either slow down election-related public-facing websites or render them inaccessible, thus preventing voters from staying updated with voting information or from accessing voting results. "The public should be aware that if foreign actors or cyber criminals were able to successfully conduct DDoS attacks against election infrastructure, the underlying data and internal systems would remain uncompromised, and anyone eligible to vote would still be able to cast a ballot," the FBI and CISA note.

"The first half of 2020 witnessed a radical change in DDoS attack methodology to shorter, faster, harder-hitting complex multi-vector attacks that we expect to continue," stated Richard Hummel, threat intelligence lead, Netscout. More than 929,000 DDoS attacks occurred in May, representing the single largest number of attacks ever seen in a month.

Attackers shifted tactics in Q2 2020, with a 570% increase in bit-and-piece DDoS attacks compared to the same period last year, according to Nexusguard. Perpetrators used bit-and-piece attacks to launch various amplification and elaborate UDP-based attacks to flood target networks with traffic.

The increase was felt across all size categories, with the biggest growth happening at opposite ends of the scale - the number of attacks sized 100 Gbps and above grew a whopping 275% and the number of very small attacks, sized 5 Gbps and below, increased by more than 200%. Overall, small attacks sized 5 Gbps and below represented 70% of all attacks mitigated between January and June of 2020. The rise in smaller DDoS attacks has been matched by increases in attack sophistication and intensity.

Neustar's Security Operations Center saw a 151 percent increase in DDoS activity in the period, including one of the largest and longest attacks that Neustar has ever mitigated - that attack came in at 1.17 terabits-per-second, and lasted five days and 18 hours. DDoS attacks are getting bigger, with what Neustar said is a "Noticeable spike" in volume: The number of attacks sized 100Gbps and above grew a whopping 275 percent.

Without early threat detection, you may not know your website has been hit by a DDoS attack until it slows down or stops, says NordVPN Teams.

Encrypted email biz Tutanota has apologised for accidentally shutting its own users out while fending off the latest of a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks. "It is a challenge to protect a privacy-focused service such as Tutanota from DDoS attacks because we need to block high-level application attacks ourselves," co-founder Matthias Pfau told The Register.

New Zealand's stock exchange has closed for a third day thanks to a distributed denial-of-service attack. The exact nature of the incident is not known: an NZX spokesperson told The Register that "Network connectivity issues relating to DDoS cybersecurity attacks" were behind the decision to close the market after around 70 minutes of Thursday today.

To handle the CDN log data spikes inherent with DDoS attacks, organizations often guesstimate how much compute they may need and maintain that higher level of resource for their logging solution. The security team would then use Kibana to interact with the Cloudflare log data to triage DDoS attacks as they occur.

Without early threat detection, you may not know your website has been hit by a DDoS attack until it slows down or stops, says NordVPN Teams. Trying to mitigate a DDoS attack after it's already begun can cost an organization a huge amount of time, money, and resources.