Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) activity hit record highs during the second quarter of 2015, with powerful attacks over 100 Gbps continuing to rock businesses around the world, according to Akamai’s latest State of the Internet report.
The report found that DDoS attacks grew in volume by 132% year-on-year and 7% since the previous quarter. Average peak attack bandwidth and volume increased slightly but remained much lower than the highs seen a year ago, with less powerful but longer duration attacks favored this quarter.
However, there were still 12 so-called ‘mega attacks’ peaking at more than plus 100 Gbps and five attacks peaking at more than 50 million packets per second (Mpps), the report claimed.
Akamai senior security advocate, Martin McKeay, warned that the primary aim of DDoS attackers is causing disruption to businesses.
“The person or group known as DDoS 4 Bitcoins (DD4BC) has been extremely prolific in threatening businesses with DDoS attacks if their extortion demands aren’t met with,” he told Infosecurity.
“Given the continued success of DD4BC, it won’t be surprising if we see copy-cats sending similar threats, either claiming to be DD4BC or coming up with their own nom de guerre. They might not even need the capability to carry through on their attacks, as the threat could be enough to make some businesses pay."
However, a growing trend is to launch DDoS attacks to distract the security team, he added.
“Like a magician who focuses your attention on his left hand while his right hand performs the trick, attackers can use a DDoS attack to draw the attention of the organization while they steal the data they came for,” McKeay explained.
“A recent example from the news is the Carphone Warehouse compromise, which used a DDoS attack as a smokescreen."
SYN and SSDP were the most popular forms of DDoS in Q2, each accounting for 16% of attack traffic.
Online gaming has remained the most heavily targeted industry for a year now , while China was the number one source of attack traffic for the second quarter in a row and has been in the top three since the first report in Q3 2011.