DDoS Attacks Surge 35% in Q3 as VoIP is Targeted

Security experts have warned of a surge in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in the third quarter, with quantity, size and complexity all increasing in the period.

The findings come from Lumen’s Q3 DDoS Report, which revealed that the firm mitigated 35% more attacks in the quarter than Q2 2021.

The vendor claimed that the largest bandwidth attack it tackled during the period was 612 Gbps — a 49% increase over Q2. The largest packet rate-based attack scrubbed was 252 Mbps — a 91% increase.

Lumen said the longest attack on a customer lasted two weeks, highlighting the potentially crippling impact DDoS can have on an organization. Among the 500 largest attacks, the most frequently attacked verticals were telecoms and software/technology, followed by retail.

For the first time, 28% of multi-vector mitigations involved a complex combination of four different attack types — DNS amplification, TCP RST, TCP SYN-ACK amplification and UDP amplification, the vendor claimed.

September marked 25 years since the first DDoS attack was recorded, with Russian provider Yandex reporting the largest volumetric attack of all time that same month.

However, according to experts, not a great deal has changed over the years in that attacks are still relatively cheap, easy and effective at disrupting victim organizations.

To that end, DDoS-ers have increasingly been using such attacks over recent years to extort ransom payments from their victims.

A report published by Neustar in August claimed that over two-fifths (44%) of organizations had been targeted or fallen victim to a ransom-related DDoS (RDDoS) attack in the previous 12 months.

Lumen director of information security and threat intelligence, Mark Dehus, revealed that attacks are also being aimed at new services such as voice.

“We want businesses to join the fight to protect themselves,” he said. “First, have a solid strategy in place to address all potential security issues. Second, work with an established DDoS mitigation partner — particularly one that can track DDoS botnets and find new sources before they launch an attack.”