Record Number Of DDoS Attacks Recorded On Akamai Routed Network In Q3 2015 – Report

The Q3 2015 State of the Internet Security Report released by Akamai  examines the latest distributed denial of service (DDoS) and web application attack stats and trends.

According to the report, Akamai’s routed network saw a record number of DDoS attacks in the third quarter of 2015 – 1,510 DDoS attacks – an increase of 180% as compared to Q3 2014 and 23% increase over Q2 2015.

“While the number of DDoS attacks rose in the last quarter and in the last year, we observed a decrease in average attack duration, as well as average peak bandwidth and volume”, the report noted.

This decrease has been mainly due to the use of booter-stresser tools. Earlier, most DDoS attacks were based on infected bots and would last until the attack was mitigate, the malicious actor gave up or the botnet was taken down. However, booter-stresser tools makes it easy for attackers to exploit network devices and unsecured service protocols. A review of the data indicates that these tools are less capable of the big attacks that infection-based botnets produce.

“In a departure from the last several quarters, Q3 data shows the UK as the top source country for DDoS attacks, responsible for 26% of attacks. China was the second most prolific source country at 21%, the us came in third (17%), and India and Spain tied for fourth at 7%”, the report said.

Moreover, the online gaming sector was majorly hit in the said quarter, accounting for 50% of the recorded DDoS attacks, followed by software and technology that suffered 25% of all attacks. Internet and telecom faced 5% of attacks, a drop from 13% last quarter.

The report further pointed out that in the third quarter last year, the vast majority of web application attacks—88%—came over http, while the remaining 12% came over https.

“Although https-based web application attacks represent only a small portion of all the web application attacks we observe, they still account for millions of attack alerts each quarter”, it added.