Akamai Technologies Reports on the Increase in Size and Volume of DDoS Attacks

The digital landscape in which virtually every public and private organization has a presence is under a relentless attack from many different sources, including organized crime, governments, hacktivists and your garden-variety hacker looking to test their skill against any security system used to protect an asset. The assault takes place 24/7 without ever stopping for holidays or special occasions, continuously seeking vulnerabilities that can be exploited for financial gain or other outcomes. According to an Internet security report from Akamai (News - Alert) Technologies, the size and volume of the average distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack bandwidth increased by 389 percent between the third quarter of 2013 and the third quarter of 2014.

In its Q3 2014 State of the Internet report, the company said it was able to defend against 17 DDoS attacks larger than 100 Gbps, with the largest being 321 Gbps. If an organization doesn’t have the right DDoS attack-mitigating system in place, its network will be overwhelmed with massive amounts of traffic that will bring to a halt all of its digital assets.

A typical corporate connection to the Internet has between one and 10 Gbps, and inundating the system with 100 or more Gbps can guarantee total disruption to its services.

John Summers, vice president of Akamai’s security business unit told PCWorld, “We’ve seen a remarkable increase in the number of very large attacks. If you do not have a way to defend [against a 100 Gbps attack], other than at the access into your infrastructure, you’re going down, there’s nothing you can do.”

Using multiple DDoS vectors, these attacks were carried out with bandwidth-consuming packets at a high rate of speed. A blog on Akamai’s site written by Bill Brenner said, “Multi-vector attacks have been fueled by the increased availability of attack toolkits with easy-to-use interfaces as well as a growing DDoS-for-hire criminal industry.”

The attacks are being carried out not only using traditional vectors such as PC and server bots, but now they have expanded to new devices including smart phones, embedded devices, ARM (News - Alert)-based devices, digital TVs, gaming consoles, smart sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT). This means any device that is connected to the Internet could potentially be used to launch a massive DDoS attack to overwhelm a system that is not adequately protected. The company believes using these new connected devices will bring attacks that are more complex, with higher bandwidth volume in future DDoS campaigns.