Attackers Pull More and Bigger DDOS Attacks

Attackers have become more organized and better equipped to launch more frequent and bigger DDOS attacks this year, according to Prolexic. The volume, duration and frequency of distributed denial-of-service hits have significantly increased during the first quarter of 2013, and 11 percent had an average bandwidth of more than 60Gbps.

The Florida-based company found an average attack bandwidth in this period of 48.25 Gbps, almost an eightfold increase over the last quarter of 2012. The beginning of the year was also defined by an increasing number of attacks against Internet Service Providers and carrier router infrastructures.

The researchers also said the largest ËœDDOS attack in history` against Spamhaus was overestimated, but they did mitigate a 130Gbps attack that month. Packet-per-second (pps) rates of DDOS attacks have also increased to an average of 32.4 million.

“Average packet-per-second rate and average bit rate spiked in the first quarter and both are growing at a fast clip,” Prolexic President Stuart Scholly said. “When you have average ” not peak ” rates in excess of 45 Gbps and 30 million packets-per-second, even the largest enterprises, carriers, and quite frankly most mitigation providers, are going to face significant challenges.”

The top source country for attacks in this period was China, which accounted for 41 percent of botnet-sourced activity, followed by the US at 22 percent, Germany at 11 percent and Iran with 5.5 percent.

Not all DDOS attacks in the first three months of the year were unusually powerful – about a quarter had a modest bandwidth of under 1Gbps.