Unprecedented DDoS surge sees ‘tsunami’ of attacks
A new report from digital trust provider DigiCert highlights an unprecedented surge in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that reached ‘internet tsunami’ scale, with two events peaking at 2.4 Tbps (terabits per second) and 3.7 Tbps respectively.
Attack traffic increasingly originates from regions where digital infrastructure is outpacing regulation, with Vietnam, Russia, Colombia, and China ranking among the top five sources.
September saw a significant rise in DDoS attacks on universities and academic networks, ranking higher than financial services and IT/Software services, timed with peak enrollment periods and open campus infrastructures.
“Attackers are not just choosing between precision and scale anymore, they’re mastering both,” says Michael Smith, AppSec CTO at DigiCert. “Our data shows that targeted precision attacks dominated two of the three months, while large-scale carpet-bombing campaigns surged in August, accounting for 65 percent of all incidents. As threats grow more complex, organizations need visibility that spans infrastructure, applications and identity to stay resilient.”
Malicious web activity rose from 51 percent in July to 73 percent in September, with 32 million bot violations recorded in September alone, confirming that automation now powers most large-scale attacks. DNS errors caused by misconfigurations jumped an astonishing 22,000 percent mid-quarter, reflecting how quickly issues can ripple across the internet.
Smith adds, “We also saw that the United States bore the brunt of these attacks, accounting for 58 percent 60 of global DDoS activity, with the United Kingdom (11 percent) and Saudi Arabia (11 percent) also heavily targeted. Adversaries are focusing their firepower on critical infrastructure and geopolitically significant regions, those where disruption has the greatest ripple effect.”
You can get the full report the DigiCert site.
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