Security News

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.

Cybercriminals claiming to represent well-known threat groups such as Fancy Bear and Armada Collective have been threatening organizations with distributed denial of service attacks, Akamai warns. Similar to extortion groups that operated in the past, the attackers would contact victim companies warning them of an imminent DDoS attack on their infrastructure, unless a ransom was paid.

According to the latest Kaspersky quarterly DDoS attacks report, DDoS events were three times more frequent in comparison to the second quarter last year, and were up 30 percent from the number of DDoS attacks observed in the first quarter of 2020. The typical annual trend for DDoS is for attacks to spike at the beginning of the year, during the peak season for businesses; while they tend to fall off in late spring and summer.

Findings from Link11's H1 2020 DDoS Report reveal a resurgence in DDoS attacks during the global COVID-19 related lockdowns. The new method of attack was used hundreds of times for DDoS attacks during the COVID-19 pandemic in the second quarter of 2020.

DDoS attacks have become a global risk, and as attacks continue to increase in complexity, further spurred by the pandemic, ISPs will have to strengthen their security measures. While DDoS attacks disrupt service for large companies and individuals alike, ISPs face increasing challenges to curb undetectable and abnormal traffic patterns before they evolve into uncontrollable reflection attacks.

Hackers continue to exploit the recently patched BIG-IP security flaw and they have plenty of potential targets as researchers have identified thousands of vulnerable systems. The security hole has been described as a critical remote code execution vulnerability that can be exploited to take complete control of a system.

In the first quarter of 2020, DDoS attacks rose more than 278% compared to Q1 2019 and more than 542% compared to the last quarter, according to Nexusguard. Researchers attribute the sharp rise in incidents to malicious efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, causing DDoS attacks to interrupt service for large companies and individuals alike.