More sophisticated DDoS attacks facilitated by compromised VPS

BleepingComputer reports that compromised Virtual Private Servers have been increasingly used to facilitate more powerful distributed denial-of-service attacks during the first three months of 2023. Leveraging misconfigured VPS instances have enabled the development of botnets that are up to 5,000 more powerful, compared with those based on Internet of Things devices, a report from Cloudflare revealed. The findings also showed that ransom DDoS attacks increased by 60% year-over-year and accounted for 16% of all DDoS attacks so far this year. Israel was most targeted by DDoS attacks, followed by the U.S., Canada, and Turkey, while internet services was the sector impacted by most DDoS attacks. Researchers also found that statistical product and service solutions-based DDoS attacks rose by 1,565% quarter-over-quarter, while DNS amplification and generic routing encapsulation-based DDoS attacks increased by 958% and 835% quarter-over-quarter, respectively. Larger and longer DDoS attacks should prompt the use of automated detection and mitigation systems, said researchers.