ID: IRCNE2013041824
Date: 2013-04-20
According to "techworld", the volume, duration and frequency of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks used to flood websites and other systems with junk traffic have significantly increased during the first three months of this year, according to a report released Wednesday by Florida-based DDOS mitigation provider Prolexic.
The average attack bandwidth seen by Prolexic during the first quarter of 2013 was of 48.25 Gbps, an eightfold increase over the last quarter of 2012, when attack bandwidth averaged at 5.9Gbps.
About 25 percent of attacks against Prolexic's customers during the first three months of 2013 were modest and had an average bandwidth of under 1Gbps. However, 11 percent had an average bandwidth of more than 60Gbps, suggesting that attackers are becoming more organized and better equipped to launch large-scale attacks, the company said.
It's not just the bandwidth of attacks that increased, but also their packet-per-second (pps) rates, which averaged at 32.4 million pps during the first quarter of the year, Prolexic said.
While a large attack bandwidth might overload a target's Internet uplink, leaving it unable to handle other legitimate traffic, a high packet-per-second rate can create problems for the routing and other networking equipment of ISPs, carriers and even DDOS mitigation providers.
The number of DDOS attacks in Q1 2013 increased by 1.75 percent over the last quarter of 2012 and by 21.75 percent over the same period of last year.
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