Threat Management

Record-breaking DDoS attacks reported last quarter

Distributed denial-of-service attack volumes have reached several thousand hits daily during the third quarter, with attacks exceeding 1,000 daily since mid-July before peaking to 8,825 attacks on August 18, Threatpost reports. Kaspersky researchers noted that there were more than 5,000 daily DDoS attacks on August 21 and 22, while more than 3,000 attacks were identified on two days in August and four days in September. Despite rising DDoS attacks, the durations of attacks have dropped, according to researchers. "This may be due to the decreasing number of attacks lasting 50 hours or more and a rise in relatively short attacks," researchers said. Meanwhile, two novel DDoS attack vectors have emerged during the past quarter, one of which involved the exploitation of the TCP protocol to launch attacks against "middleboxes," or security devices between clients and servers, while the other attack dubbed "Black Storm" involved the inundation of closed port access requests to communication service provider networks.

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