DDoS

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".

DDoS attacks remain a major problem for businesses and can have serious consequences.

Data center services supplier US Signal is launching a new cloud-based offering. Building on the company’s partnership with Cloudflare it delivers a robust, customizable service that protects organizations against online threats including DDoS, ransomware, malicious bots and application-layer attacks.

In the second quarter of 2019, the total number of DDoS attacks grew by 18 percent, compared to the same period in 2018 according to a new report from Kaspersky.

There is, however, a drop compared to the first quarter of this year, with attacks down 44 percent. Kaspersky attributes this to seasonal variation with DDoS attack usually declining in late spring and summer.

The number of DDoS attacks during the first quarter of 2019 increased by 84 percent compared with the previous quarter according to a new report from Kaspersky Lab.

This reverses last year's trend of declining DDoS attacks as attackers shifted their attention to other sources of income, such as crypto-mining.

2018 saw a decline of 13 percent in the overall number of DDoS attacks when compared to the previous year, but cybercriminals are turning to longer, more sophisticated, mixed and HTTP flood attack techniques.

This is revealed in Kaspersky Lab's DDoS Q4 2018 Intelligence Report, which also shows the average attack duration has grown. Compared with the beginning of the year, the average length of attacks has more than doubled -- from 95 minutes in Q1 to 218 minutes in Q4 2018.

Communications service providers were targeted by 65.5 percent of DDoS attacks in the third quarter of 2018 according to a new report.

The Q3 2018 Threat Report from Nexusguard shows attackers contaminated a diverse pool of IP addresses across hundreds of IP prefixes by using very small-sized junk traffic.

Cybercriminals are just as keen to exploit the holiday shopping boom as anyone else, with DDoS attacks on eCommerce providers increasing by over 70 percent on Black Friday compared with other days in November. On Cyber Monday, attacks increased by 109 percent compared with the November average.

Cloud anti-DDoS company Link11 has released data showing several attacks observed during Black Friday and Cyber Monday were of up to 100 Gbps bandwidth, and the average attack volume on both days was just under 6Gbps.

In Europe DDoS attack volumes have increased sharply during the third quarter 2018 according to a new report.

The report from DDoS protection specialist Link11 shows the average attack volume more than doubled in July, August and September, to 4.6 Gbps (up from 2.2 Gbps in Q2).

Hackers are increasingly abusing public cloud services in order to launch DDoS attacks, according to new research.

The study from anti-DDoS company Link11 shows that a quarter of all DDoS attacks in Europe in the 12 months from July 2017 to June 2018 used public cloud server-based botnets, compared to 18.5 percent in the previous 12 months.

Cybercriminals are delving into the past to launch attacks based on some very old vulnerabilities according to the latest report from Kaspersky Lab, and they're using Linux to do it.

In the second quarter of 2018, experts have reported DDoS attacks involving a vulnerability in the Universal Plug-and-Play protocol known since 2001. Also, the Kaspersky DDoS Protection team observed an attack organized using a vulnerability in the CHARGEN protocol that was described as far back as 1983.

It's well known that sound at particular levels can cause problems -- we've all seen demonstrations of wine glasses being shattered by high frequencies, for example.

You might not think that's much of an issue for computers, but researchers at the University of Michigan and Zhejiang University in China have shown that sounds can be used to interfere with disks.

Long-lasting DDoS attacks made a return in the first quarter of 2018 with the longest attack seen lasting 297 hours (more than 12 days). The last time a longer attack than this occurred was at the end of 2015.

This is among the findings of Kaspersky Lab's latest DDoS intelligence report which reveals that in the first quarter of 2018, DDoS attacks were registered against targets in 79 countries.

Although it's relatively new, the cryptocurrency industry was the fifth most attacked by DDoS in the final quarter of 2017.

Imperva's latest Global DDoS Threat Landscape Report finds the spike in cryptocurrency prices has attracted the attention of attackers. Also the number of exchanges has increased to 190, up from 70 in Q3.

DDoS attacks using domain name server (DNS) amplification increased more than 357 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017 compared to the previous year.

A new report by protection specialist Nexusguard attributes the rise to the use of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), a technology that's intended to add integrity and security to the DNS protocol.

The financial impact of a DDoS attack is continuing to rise globally -- totaling on average over $120,000 per attack for SMBs and over $2 million for enterprises.

These findings come from a study by Kaspersky Lab which shows that the cost of a DDoS attack in 2017 was almost $20,000 higher for SMEs than in 2016 and more than half a million dollars more for enterprises.