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DDoS Attacks on the rise in Q1 2015, says Akamai

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

Elsio Pinto (@high54security) is at the moment the Lead Mcafee Security Engineer at Swiss Re, but he also as knowledge in the areas of malware research, forensics, ethical hacking. He had previous experiences in major institutions being the European Parliament one of them. He is a security enthusiast and tries his best to pass his knowledge. He also owns his own blog http://high54security.blogspot.com/

Edited by Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – DDoS, Akamai)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.