The number of DDoS attacks declined by 55 percent globally in the second quarter of 2017

The number of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks declined 55 percent in the second quarter of 2017 compared to the first quarter globally, a new report said on Thursday. [caption id=“attachment_3829223” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Reuters[/caption]

According to the global **Internet security** firm Verisign, the average attack peak size also decreased by 81 percent in the quarter.

The report said the DDoS attacks remained unpredictable, persistent and varied widely in terms of volume, speed and complexity. Around 50 percent of customers who experienced the attacks were targeted multiple times during the quarter. Verisign said that 74 percent of DDoS attacks it mitigated employed multiple attack types. “User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flood attacks dominated in the quarter, making up 57 percent of total attacks. The most common UDP floods included Domain Name System (DNS), Network Time Protocol (NTP), Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP), and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) reflective amplification attacks,” the report noted. IT (52 percent) and financial sector (31 percent) continued to be the consistent target of the attacks.