Incident Response, TDR, Threat Management, Vulnerability Management

Quantity and strength of DDoS attacks increased in Q2 2015, report shows

Akamai saw an increase in the quantity and strength of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the second quarter of 2015.

In Q2 there were 12 attacks that peaked at more than 100 gigabits per second (Gbps), the largest of which measured 240 Gbps and persisted for more than 13 hours, according to the company's Q2 2015 State of the Internet report. Additionally, the security firm recorded one of its highest packet rate attacks in the latest quarter, which peaked at 214 million packets per second.

Altogether, average peak bandwidth increased 15.46 percent from the first quarter of this year; however, an 11.47 percent drop was observed from the second quarter of 2014.

Researchers expect future attacks to surpass these levels.

“DDoS for hire attacks are becoming more popular,” David Fernandez, of Akamai's PLXsert team, told SCMagazine.com on Tuesday. He said attackers have more access to tools, vulnerable devices and a monetized framework that help make these attacks a lucrative business.

The total number of DDoS attacks increased 132.43 percent compared to Q2 2014, and 7.1 percent compared to Q1 2015. Infrastructure layer (Layer 3 & 4) and application layer (Layer 7) DDoS attacks increased 133.66 percent and 122.22 percent respectively compared to Q2 2014 and 6.04 percent and 16.85 percent respectively when compared to Q1 2015.

SYN and SSDP were the most common DDoS attack vectors, each accounting for 16 percent of DDoS traffic in Q2 of 2015, the report said, explaining this could be due to an abundance of unsecured devices using Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol.

Fernandez said collaboration between vendors and the community is needed to ensure that vulnerable devices and services are secured and cannot be exploited.

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