In May 2020, Amazon reported the migration of 2.3 Tbps flooding attack using their AWS Shield. On 21 June, Akamai reported an attack of 809 Mpps lasting less than 10 minutes and using a large number of new IP addresses.
Dr. Craig Labovitz, Nokia Deepfield CTO, reported more than 100% increase in daily DDoS peak traffic between January 2020 and May 2021. He also warned of newly identified DDoS threat potential over 10 Tbps – four to five times higher than the largest current attacks reported – due to rapidly growing number of open and insecure internet services and IoT devices.
Nokia Deepfield reported that between January 2020 and May 2021, it found accessibility of DDoS for hire services to have increased the threat potential of the existing botnet, IoT and cloud-based attack models.
The results trace the origins of most of the high-bandwidth, high-intensity (volumetric) attacks to a limited number of internet domains, finding that most global DDoS attacks (by frequency and traffic volume) originate in less than 50 hosting companies and regional providers.
Numbers up
As COVID lockdown measures were implemented in 2020, Nokia Deepfield noticed a 40-50% increase in DDoS traffic. The continued increases in intensity, frequency and sophistication of DDoS attacks have resulted in a 100% increase in the “high watermark levels” of DDoS daily peaks – from 1.5 Tbps (January 2020) to over 3 Tbps (May 2021).
With broadband connectivity becoming an essential service, the fight against DDoS is critical. These large-scale DDoS attacks can inflict major damage on individual and large-scale connectivity and service availability, resulting in damages costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in production and operational losses.
Accurate DDoS detection and cost-effective, automated mitigation are becoming paramount requirements for service providers, cloud builders and network operators to protect their network infrastructures, services and users.
United we stand
Nokia Deepfield CTO, Dr. Craig Labovitz noted the importance for every participant in the network security ecosystem – end users, vendors, service providers, cloud builders, regulators and governments – to understand the dangers DDoS poses to the availability of internet content, applications and critical connectivity services.
“With this knowledge and a community commitment to solving the DDoS problem, we can go a long way towards making our networks, services and subscribers more secure,” he added.
