Mitigating Cyberattacks

 The frequency of distributed denial of service (DDoS) assaults has grown exponentially over time.

Unfortunately, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have grown exponentially over time; in 2021, there were more than 9.75 million such attacks. According to a recent survey, organizations in Singapore are actually among the most often targeted by ransomware assaults worldwide, with 80% reporting being the victim of an attack in the last two years.

The amount of DDoS attacks that can occur

DDoS attacks exhibit seasonality, thus there will be times when attacks are more common, as is the case with many phenomena. When a new approach is introduced, everyone can be eager to try it or copy it, but other times there might be a break in activity. A total of 4,572 attacks were thwarted by Lumen in Q2 2022, a 26% down from Q1—typically a very busy quarter. Lumen  were preventing 50 attacks daily on average, with April 8 and April 13 seeing the highest attacks (111 and 108 respectively).

The scale of DDoS attacks

More than 1 Tbps of bandwidth was attacked, and Lumen successfully mitigated it. This represents a 153% yearly increase and a 37% quarter-over-quarter increase.

The median attack size dropped by 43% from the previous quarter to 110 Kbps. This may be the result of attackers probing enterprises with modest assaults to discover if they have DDoS protection.

Duration of DDoS attacks

The longest attack period duration Lumen have witnessed since they started giving reports was 21 days and 8 hours, which is the longest they have ever mitigated. This does not imply that there was a single assault that persisted for 21 days, but rather that there was an ongoing campaign that may have included several strikes throughout time.

The average assault size was consistent with what Lumen seen in other quarters. The length of the average attack period went from two and a half hours to three and a half hours, an increase of 39% quarterly. Attack-period lengths decreased by 20% and 33% year on average and median, respectively.

Targets of DDoS attacks

96% of the 500 biggest assaults Lumen stopped were directed at the top five verticals—telecom (73%), software and technology (14%), gaming (4.2%), government (3.6%), and hosting (1.8%). It is crucial to understand that just because an attacker is focusing on a telecoms company, it doesn’t always indicate that the telco is the attacker’s primary objective. The client base of the telecom may be the focus of the cybercriminal’s numerous victim’s plan.

Protecting myself from DDoS attacks

1. Ensure that multi-factor authentication is used to safeguard your accounts.
2. Update the services you have running in the cloud.
3. Change your passwords, clean up afflicted hosts in quarantine, remove or disable any mechanisms that might allow the threat to linger in your cloud environment, and take any relevant mitigating steps.