High-Bandwidth DDoS Attacks Becoming More Commonplace, Verisign Finds

By Sean Michael Kerner

One of the highlights of Verisign’s third-quarter DDoS trends report is the observation that attacks of 10G bps or greater have grown quarter over quarter. During the third quarter, 10G-bps attacks represented 20 percent of all attacks seen by Verisign.

The second quarter of 2014 had several massive attacks that skewed the data somewhat and led to an average attack size of 12.42G bps. When Verisign normalized the second quarter data, removing the outlier massive attacks, the average attack size was 4.60G bps. In contrast, the third-quarter average came in at 6.46G bps.

Repeat attacks against the same organization are becoming increasingly common, the report found. During the quarter, there was an average of 3.3 DDoS attacks per organization.

While every industry is a potential target of a DDoS attack, the majority of attacks observed by Verisign during the third quarter targeted the media and entertainment sector.

While media and entertainment companies represented the industry with the majority of DDoS attacks by attack volume, the largest attack by bandwidth during the quarter impacted the e-commerce market.

Attacks that leverage User Datagram Protocol (UDP) technologies including Network Time Protocol (NTP) produced the largest attack bandwidth in the third quarter, peaking at 90G bps.

For the first time, Verisign saw DDoS attacks leveraging the Simple Service Directory Protocol (SSDP), which is a UDP-based protocol, during the third quarter. The largest SSDP-based attack in the quarter was reported at 15G bps.