Pierluigi Paganini May 20, 2015

DDoS attacks even more dangerous according to the last report published by Akamai Technologies, the “Q1 2015 State of the Internet – Security Report”.

According to Akamai Technologies, Q1 2015 showed that distributed denial-of-service attacks are on the rise again, and according to Akamai Technologies, Q1 set a record for the number of DDoS attacks, where the numbers of attacks by DDoS doubled comparing with Q1 2014.

Some curious numbers about DDoS compared with 2014:

Eric Kobrin, the Akamai’s director of information security associated the increase of DDoS attacks with the continued “exploitation of network devices and associated protocols for reflection attacks, as well as the growing popularity of DDoS-for-hire sites.”

“(It’s) very inexpensive to launch attacks DDoS being used as a preferred attack method for malicious actors,” explained Kobrin. “As a result, we have noticed an increase within our customer base as well an overall higher demand for cloud-based DDoS mitigation services.” 

More useful information extracted from the study is that Akamai registered eight major DDoS attacks, “Mega attacks” that reached more than 100 Gigabits per second, with a peak of 170 Gbps:

The attackers practically every attack technique, including Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP), SYN floods, DNS, ICMP, etc.

To have a cleared idea of the attack vectors, in the picture below are reported DDoS attack types:

“Some of the growth is likely related to new vulnerability disclosures and the commercialization of DDoS botnets,”,”Some of it may be an artifact of our evolving measurement systems.”

The report mentions also a possible evolution of DDoS attacks with the adoption of the IPv6 protocol.

“Because IPv6 grants each user a large address space…security solutions may be bypassed by attackers appearing to come from multiple addresses without needing to purchase or steal more connectivity,” . “Additionally, software designed for IPv4, which had IPv6 shoehorned in, may not have duplicated the protections which had been added for v4 vulnerabilities to the v6 side of the codebase.”

Enjoy the report!

About the Author Elsio Pinto

Edited by Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – DDoS, Akamai)