DDoS attacks nearly double in Q4

DDoS attacks increased in both frequency and scale during the fourth quarter, with the number of observed attacks nearly doubling year on year, according to Akamai.

The cloud services vendor’s latest ‘State of the Internet - Security’ report also shows that the average peak bandwidth of DDoS attacks grew by 52% year on year.

Akamai said it has observed a rise in the use of reflection-based DDoS attacks, which rely on internet protocols that respond with more traffic than they receive and do not require an attacker to gain control over the server or device. Nearly 40% of all DDoS attacks used such techniques.

Another observed trend was the expansion of the DDoS-for-hire market, the report states.

Application-layer attacks meanwhile increased by 51% year on year, infrastructure-layer attacks were up by 58% and multivector attacks climbed 84%. More than 44% of attacks used multiple vectors.

During the quarter, nine attacks were observed that involved traffic exceeding 100 Gbps, up from three a year earlier.

“An incredible number of DDoS attacks occurred in the fourth quarter,” Akamai VP of cloud security business unit John Summers said.

“Denial of service is a common and active threat to a wide range of enterprises. The DDoS attack traffic was not limited to a single industry such as online entertainment, that made headlines in December. Instead, attacks were spread among a wide variety of industries.”

Image courtesy Akamai