DDoS attacks are now presenting a more formidable threat than ever as they are found to be bigger and able to hit more targets.
The average size of an attack now exceeds 50 Gbps, four times the size of the average attack just two years ago.
This insight comes from secure application services provider, A10 Networks, presented in a report that also shows that 57 per cent of organisations have been hit by between six and 25 attacks in 2017.
In 2015, only 14 per cent of organisations were hit as frequently, indicating a massive increase in the volume of formidable attacks.
James Clegg, VP EMEA at FireMon, said:”The growth in volumetric DDoS traffic is good news to those with centralised policy control, as they can identify the volumetric trend with whatever detection systems they have deployed and then initiate Access Control Lists to drop the traffic at the ingress point. This hugely reduces the cost, time and latency of directing volumetric DDoS traffic to a centralised point of scrubbing.”
It is also highlighted in the report that the network layer has remained the most popular target for DDoS attacks, with 29 per cent of the survey’s respondents pointing to this area. Areas such as the application layer are however experiencing increasing attacks.
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Javvad Malik, security advocate at AlienVault, said: “As more and more devices are connected online, it increases the number of devices that could be recruited into a botnet to launch DDoS attacks. So, it is not overly surprising to see criminals take advantage of this, particularly with poorly-secured IoT devices that can partake in DDoS attacks.”
On an encouraging note, the research also shows that solutions are proving to be effective in tackling DDoS attacks. Only 15 per cent of the attacks in 2017 have caused more than 25 hours of downtime, almost halved from the 29 per cent noted in 2015.
