Distributed denial-of-service attacks turned to be strong this year, setting new records and taking the extortion mode that started last August to the next level.
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks turned on to be strong this year, setting new records and taking the extortion mode that started last August to the next level.
Internet security services company Akamai has already handled a massive known ransom DDoS (RDDoS) attack, which was additionally more complicated than previously seen incidents of the same type.
Akamai says that in February, they dealt with “three of the six biggest volumetric DDoS attacks” the company has ever recorded.
Out of these, two were the largest known ransom DDoS attacks. The latest of them peaked at 800Gbps; it focused on a gambling company in Europe and was also probably the most advanced Akamai noticed since extortion DDoS began.
“Since the start of the [ransom DDoS] campaign, show-of-force attacks have grown from 200+ Gbps in August to 500+ Gbps by mid-September, then ballooned to 800+ Gbps by February 2021”, reported Akamai.
Akamai reported that the perpetrators employed a new DDoS attack vector: a networking protocol known as the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) or protocol 33.
Leveraging DCCP for DDoS leads to a volumetric attack and can bypass the defences set up for the TCP and UDP traffic flows that are generally seen throughout these incidents.
Overall, the 2021 DDoS campaigns are more targeted and more persistent, Akamai says.
“In one attack, the threat actors targeted nearly a dozen IPs and rotated through multiple DDoS attack vectors trying to increase the likelihood of disrupting the back-end environments. In fact, 65% of DDoS attacks launched against customers were multi-vector,” Akamai says.
This year, an overall increase in the number of DDoS attacks is expected to be accompanied by a spike in large DDoS attacks (at more than 50 Gbps), with more organizations in more industries likely being targeted.
For the latest cyber threats and the latest hacking news please follow us on Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter.
You may be interested in reading: How to Survive the COVID Time Cyber Security Threats?