According to Netscout, the volume of application-layer distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting HTTP and HTTPS websites has grown by three orders of magnitude between 2019 and 2022, thanks to groups like Killnet.
security vendor’s DDoS Threat Intelligence Report Data for the second half of 2022 were compiled from data collected by the ATLAS network, which covers 93 countries and more than 50% of the world’s internet traffic.
The biggest surge in website attacks since 2019 came in late 2022, thanks to the activity of pro-Russian groups.
Netscout claimed that the US national security sector experienced a massive 16,815% increase in attacks from Killnet hacktivists. This includes a surge after President Biden made public statements at his G7 summit and a same-day surge after both French and US presidents reaffirmed their support for Ukraine.
For more information on Killnet attacks, see Killnet Group uses DDoS attacks against Azure-based healthcare apps.
The vendor also points to an 18% increase in direct path attacks over the past three years, which corresponds to a roughly similar decrease in reflection/amplification attacks.
As the name suggests, direct path attacks target individual organizations directly, while reflection/amplification spoofs the target’s IP address and sends information requests to UDP/TCP servers.
Malicious bots were a major contributor to direct path attacks. Netscout says that in 2022 he tracked over 1.35 million bots from malware families such as Mirai, Meris and Dvinis, and businesses received over 350,000 security-related alerts involving botnets.
Netscout argues that various attack techniques such as these require a hybrid approach to DDoS mitigation.
The company also highlighted that its peak daily DDoS alert traffic reached 436 petabits and over 75 trillion packets. This is another indicator of the scale of modern DDoS threats.
“DDoS attacks are threatening organizations around the world and threatening their ability to deliver critical services,” said Richard Hummel, Threat Intelligence Lead at Netscout.
“As multi-terabits per second attacks become commonplace and malicious attacker arsenals continue to grow in sophistication and complexity, organizations need strategies that can quickly adapt to the dynamic nature of the DDoS threat landscape. I am.”
DDoS attacks against wireless providers have increased 79% since 2020, driven by the rise of 5G wireless in homes, the report notes.
