Every industry is at an increased risk of DDoS attacks: Verisign report

If a Verisign report about Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks is to be believed then they are now frequent and bigger than ever before. The Verisign Distributed Denial of Service trend report for Q4 2015 reveals that the the attacks increased by 85 percent compared to Q4 2014. And, 15 percent more attacks compared to Q1 2014. Some of the key highlights of the Verisign report are DDoS activity was the highest in Q4 2015 since the inception of the report back in 2013. Q4 2015 also saw the fastest flood attacks with 125 million packets per second (Mpps) and driving volumetric DDoS attack of 65 gigabits per second (Gbps). Industries like IT services, cloud and SaaS faced the most DDoS attacks, followed by media and entertainment. It is 30 percent of all mitigations. “The most common attacks Verisign mitigated were User Datagram Protocol (UDP) floods, including Network Time Protocol (NTP), Domain Name System (DNS), and Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) floods, which collectively accounted for approximately 75 percent of attacks in Q4 2015,” the report adds. “The Financial and Public sectors were also heavily targeted, representing 15 and 10 percent of all mitigations and averaging 2.8 Gbps and 2.5 Gbps in attack size respectively. Compared to other industries, the attacks against E-Commerce and Telecommunications sectors were relatively large, averaging 12.7 Gbps and 11.9 Gbps respectively,” the report further adds. On defending organisations against such attacks, Verisign says it requires large-scale DNS infrastructure and also the ability to analyse and filter out illegitimate DNS traffic. “Consider augmenting your existing DNS capacity with a cloud-based hosted DNS or managed DNS service,” the report states.