DDoS attacks are becoming more prevalent each year, and a real nuisance for service providers trying to effectively run a network. The idea behind these attacks is to overwhelm a website or network service with traffic to cause temporary disruption. It’s unclear why people engage in these measures, but perhaps it’s some sort of protest against a website’s content or anger towards society. Whatever the case, DDoS attacks are a major problem and the latest State of the Internet report makes for some alarming reading. According to the data, DDoS attacks increased by a whopping 148.85 percent in Q4 2015 compared to Q4 2014.
Furthermore, there was a 168.82 percent increase in infrastructure layer 3 and 4 attacks. Interestingly, the quantity of DDoS attacks increased by 39.89 percent versus the last quarter which shows their rapid rise. There’s a lot of quick attacks being made and the average duration decreased from 29.33 hours to 14.95 hours. This is a reduction of 49.03 percent compared to Q4 2014. The report goes onto say:
“In other words, while the average gigabits per second per attack increased, the average number of packets per second decreased,”
“In fact, only three attacks exceeded 30 million packets per second in Q4, a statistic that has steadily decreased for several quarters.”
“Sites offering booter tools are purportedly set up to allow administrators to load test their own sites. However, many of the sites are used as DoS-for-hire tools, relying on reflection attacks to generate traffic.”
Other data shows DNS-based traffic rose by 92 percent, chargen traffic went up by 52 percent and udp grew by 20 percent. There was even one attack which reached 309Gbps, and five instances of attacks over 100GBps. This is down though from Q4 2014’s figure of five. As you can see, DDoS attacks are really becoming problematic especially from the Chinese region. It looks like this trend will continue and increase at a scary pace.
