A recent, brief disruption at Canadian airports is a reminder that Russia-aligned hacking groups’ bark remains worse than their bite. The problems began Sunday afternoon at multiple airports including Montreal-Trudeau International Airport, which reported that there had been “a national system failure of the automated kiosks” that was “causing a slowdown at border control.” As…

Average DDoS attack sizes decrease 85% due to FBI’s shutdown of DDoS-for-hire websites

The FBI’s shutdown of the 15 largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) for hire vendors (booters) reduced the overall number of attacks worldwide by nearly 11 percent compared to the same period last year. Along with the fewer total attacks, the average size decreased by 85 percent as did the maximum attack size by 24 percent, indicating…

Average DDoS attack volumes grew by 194% in 12 months

The volume and complexity of DDoS attacks continued to grow in Europe during the final quarter of 2018, according to Link11. While Link11’s Security Operations Center (LSOC) registered 13,910 attacks in Q4 (12.7% down compared to Q3), the average attack volume grew by 8.7% to 5Gbps, and 59% of attacks used multiple attack vectors. Key…

Massive DDoS Attack Generates 500 Million Packets per Second

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) c do not have to be bandwidth-intensive to be disruptive and hard to mitigate. Earlier this month, Imperva mitigated an attack against one of its clients that exceeded 500 million packets per second, making it possibly the largest DDoS attack by packet volume ever recorded. The January 10 attack was a so-called…

SSDP amplification attacks rose 639%

The Nexusguard Q3 2018 Threat Report has revealed the emergence of an extremely stealthy DDoS attack pattern targeting communications service providers (CSPs). This new vector exploits the large attack surface of ASN-level (autonomous system number) CSPs by spreading tiny attack traffic across hundreds of IP addresses to evade detection. The ongoing evolution of DDoS methods…