carry-out-ddos | DDoSInfo – Information about DDoS and Denial of Service Attacks

The internet’s new scourge is hugely damaging global attacks that harness armies of routers, cameras, and other connected gadgets—the so-called Internet of Things (IoT)—to direct floods of traffic that can take down swaths of the network. The blame so far has largely fallen on the Chinese manufacturers who churn out devices with shoddy security on the cheap. But all those devices have to be plugged in somewhere for them to used maliciously. And American consumers are increasingly the ones plugging them in. Nearly a quarter of the internet addresses behind these distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks are located in the United States, newresearch from network services firm Akamai has found. Some 180,000 US IP addresses took part in DDoS attacks in the last quarter of 2016, it found—more than four times as many as addresses originating in China. Akamai’s findings are particularly notable because the armies of hacked devices that carry out DDoS attacks—such as those controlled by the Mirai malware—don’t bother covering their tracks. That means the IP addresses are far more likely to genuinely correspond to a location within a certain country, the report’s authors write. The findings also end an era of Chinese dominance in DDoS attacks. Over the previous year, China has accounted for the highest proportion of IP addresses taking part in such attacks globally. Now the US is the clear leader, accounting for 24% of such addresses. The UK and Germany are a distant second and third. (To be clear, though, wherever the attacking devices’ IP addresses are, the person controlling them could be located anywhere.) The huge number of devices taking part in DDoS attacks in the US means regulation there, and in Europe, could stem the flood of damaging traffic. Of course, IoT regulation is a thorny issue—essentially, no US federal agency really wants to take the problem on—and there remain technical questions over how to actually go about blocking the attacks. Still, it’s a lot clearer now that simply pointing the finger at China isn’t enough. Source: https://qz.com/912419/akamai-akam-report-a-quarter-of-ddos-ip-addresses-are-now-from-the-us/

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Blame the US, not China, for the recent surge in massive cyberattacks

More than half (53 percent) of service providers indicated they are seeing more than 21 DDoS attacks per month, up from 44 percent last year. New research from Arbor Networks’ 12th Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report (WISR) focuses on the operational challenges internet operators face daily from network-based threats and the strategies adopted to address and mitigate them. The survey polled 356 respondents that included services providers, hosting, mobile, enterprise and other types of network operators around the world. Since the WISR began in 2005, DDoS attack size has grown 7900 percent. Attacks increased by 60 percent in 2016. Twenty-one percent of data centre respondents saw more than 50 attacks per month, as opposed to only eight percent last year. More than 10 attacks per month were experienced by 45 percent of enterprise, government and education (EGE) respondents. Two-thirds (67 percent) of service providers and 40 percent of EGE respondents reported seeing multi-vector attacks on their networks. Sixty-one percent of data centre operators reported attacks totally saturating data centre bandwidth. A quarter of data centre and cloud providers saw the cost of a major DDoS attack rise above £79,000, and five percent cited costs of over £793,000. Forty-one percent of EGE organisations reported reportedDDoS attacks exceeding their total internet capacity. Nearly 55 percent of EGE respondents now carry out DDoS defence simulations, with about 40 percent carrying them out at least on a quarterly basis. Data centre and cloud provider respondents using firewalls for DDoS defence has fallen from 71 percent to 40 percent. “The survey respondents have grown accustomed to a constantly evolving threat environment with steady increases in attack size and complexity over the past decade. However, IoT botnets are a game changer because of the numbers involved. There are billions of these devices deployed, and they are being easily weaponised to launch massive attacks. Increasing concern over the threat environment is reflected in the survey results, which show significant improvements in the deployment of best practice technologies and response processes,” said Darren Anstee, chief security technologist at Arbor Networks. Source: https://www.scmagazineuk.com/53-of-service-providers-are-seeing-over-21-ddos-attacks-per-month/article/633962/

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53% of service providers are seeing over 21 DDoS attacks per month