Articles about DDoS

With the UK and US being amongst the top four most targeted nations for network DDoS attacks during the first half of 2021, this is clearly a problem that hasn't gone away amid all the pandemic-related news.

We spoke to David Elmaleh, senior product manager, Edge Services at Imperva. to discuss the impact DDoS attacks can have and why it's essential for organizations to monitor for anomalies relating to unexplained traffic spikes.

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In the first half of 2021, cybercriminals launched approximately 5.4 million DDoS attacks, representing an 11 percent increase over the same period in 2020.

The latest threat intelligence report from NETSCOUT shows that in the first half of the year cybercriminals weaponized and exploited seven new reflection/amplification DDoS attack vectors putting organizations at greater risk.

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With companies relying more on technology, such as web applications, third-party solutions, and cloud computing than ever before, corporate cybersecurity has had to become the backbone of modern businesses. In the presence of remote work environments where IoT security has never been more vulnerable, companies need to effectively and quickly adapt to the rapidly evolving methods and techniques that hackers are beginning to employ.

Business vulnerabilities like a weak human firewall could lead to an increased susceptibility to a variety of cybersecurity attacks, such as ransomware and DDOS attacks. But despite all of these challenges, comprehensive and reliable cybersecurity solutions are very much achievable when approached correctly. In order to protect yourself against contemporary security threats, however, one must first understand the threats and risks they are trying to prevent and mitigate.

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Cybercriminals had a busy year in 2020, with rapidly increasing numbers of distributed denial of service (DDoS) weapons, widespread botnet activity, and some of the largest DDoS attacks ever recorded. As COVID-19 drove an urgent shift online for everything from education and healthcare, to consumer shopping, to office work, hackers had more targets available than ever -- many of them under protected due to the difficulty of maintaining security best practices in an emergency scenario.

At the same time, the ongoing rollout of 5G technologies has accelerated the proliferation of IoT and smart devices around the world, making unsuspecting new recruits available for botnet armies to launch crushing attacks on a massive scale.  

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A lockdown increase in online gaming activity has inevitably attracted attention from attackers, resulting in nearly 77 percent of cyberattacks targeting the online gaming and gambling industries in Q3 of 2020.

The latest DDoS Threat Report from Nexusguard also reveals a huge 287 percent increase in total DDoS attacks in the third quarter compared to the same period last year.

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Although ransomware has dominated 2020's cyber threat landscape, DDoS attacks haven’t gone away. In fact the year has seen the largest DDoS attack ever recorded, peaking at 2.3 Terabytes per second.

The attack was carried out by deploying hijacked CLDAP (Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) web servers and caused three days of downtime for the unnamed targeted business. This is one of the things highlighted in new analysis from Digital Shadows.

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Cybercriminals have launched a record number attacks on online platforms and services this year, with more than 929,000 DDoS attacks occurring in May, the single largest number of attacks ever seen in a month.

The latest threat intelligence report from NETSCOUT also reveals that 4.83 million DDoS attacks occurred in the first half of 2020, a 15 percent increase, and attack frequency jumped 25 percent during the peak pandemic lockdown months of March through June.

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The second quarter of 2020 has seen a massive 570 percent increase in 'bit-and-piece' DDoS attacks compared to the same period last year, according to the latest threat report from Nexusguard.

Bit-and-piece attacks target ASN-level communication service provider (CSP) networks by dispersing small pieces of junk traffic across a diverse pool of IP addresses across hundreds of IP prefixes.

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In the first quarter of this year, DDoS attacks rose more than 278 percent compared to Q1 2019 and more than 542 percent compared to the previous quarter.

This is among the findings of the Nexusguard Q1 2020 Threat Report. 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.

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New research from DNS intelligence specialist Farsight Security, focusing on over 300 leading websites, finds that between March and April there has been an increase in DDoS events involving popular brand names.

It also reveals that DNS cache misses (which occur when the data fetched is not present in the cache) showed an increase of between four and seven times.

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DDoS attacks are a continuing problem for businesses and a new report reveals that they are also growing in complexity.

The 2019 DDoS report from Link11 reveals that the share of multivector attacks -- which target and misuse several protocols -- grew significantly from 46 percent in the first quarter to 65 percent in the fourth quarter.

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Software-defined perimeters (SDP) use a combination of strong authentication, granular authorization and network segmentation to enable access from anywhere, creating a new kind of defense against a variety of cyberattacks. SDP is more secure than a firewall or a VPN and is more granular than a NAC. Compared to these alternative approaches, SDP offers improved security and operational simplicity for users and IT admins alike.

SDP employs multiple techniques in order to provide secure access. First, it leverages identity and access management (IAM) to authenticate every user that attempts to access a resource or application on the network. It then employs granular authorization to restrict the services that each user can access once logged in. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the approach is its ability to provide "resource cloaking", ensuring that no DNS information or "visible" IP ports of protected resources are exposed to the Internet, which significantly reduces a network’s attack surface. This has the effect of creating a resilient defense against common attacks that hackers employ, such as the following:

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DNS amplification attacks have grown by over 4,000 percent over the last year according to Nexusguard's latest threat report.

DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) remains the main source of growth in DNS amplification attacks in the quarter, but Nexusguard analysts have also detected a sharp and concerning rise in TCP SYN Flood attacks.

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The second quarter of 2019 saw DNS amplification DDoS attacks up more than 1,000 percent over the same period last year according to the latest threat report from Nexusguard.

Nexusguard researchers attribute Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) with fueling the new wave of DNS amplification attacks, which accounted for more than 65 percent of the attacks last quarter according to the team's evaluation of thousands of worldwide DDoS attacks.

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A DDoS attack rocked Wikipedia on Friday, taking the site offline in a number of countries.

The online encyclopedia was forced offline for several hours across Europe and the Middle East, and the site battled the attack to restore service. The Wikimedia Foundation -- the organization behind the site -- condemned the attack saying it wanted to protect the "fundamental right" for people to be able to "freely access and share information".

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