DailyPost 2154
MASSIVE DDOS ATTACKS
Distributed denial of service attacks is directed to bring down services / website and by its very nature it has to be humungous, failing which it does not serve the purpose. Even by the DDOS standards that nature of attacks which have been taking place in the recent past has hit the roof. It can bring any company on its knees in no time. Try to visualize a situation where Wikipedia receives all its daily requests in just 10 seconds. Wikipedia happens to be one of the top 10 trafficked websites in the world. This is what exactly what Google is said to have blocked in the largest ever distributed denial of service attack in June, which peaked at 46 million requests per second.
As the nature of exponential increase has to be put in the right perspective. The Google attack was 76% larger than the previous record DDoS attack that Cloud flare has successfully thwarted in the earlier part of the same month. In purely quantitative terms the attacks have increased by more than 200% compared to last year. What do such attacks to in reality? These are the types of security events that make desperate attempts to flood target organizations’ networks with junk traffic. This being the case, even having the technical competence to block decimates the business value. It becomes impossible to conduct legitimate business online.
Three record breaking DDOS attacks in a span of the three months is certainly a matter of grave security concern. It is also a clear indicator of the trajectory these attacks are taking. The earlier two attacks were blocked by Cloud flare. In the backdrop of these events Google and other security researchers warn that the network-flooding events would get worse, as it grows in size and frequency. Google has provided the timeline of the attack, the attack aggravated to 46 million in just around 10 mins. Google says, it Cloud Armor Adaptive Protection service detected the attack, generated an alert and recommended a rule to block the malicious signature.
As per Kaspersky, DDOS attacks are at an all time high in Q1 2022. Googlers point out some noteworthy characteristics of the attack, in addition to the high volume. There is also a link between it and earlier Cloud flare thwarted DDOS flood, which looks to be the next phase of Meris attacks. Both the geographic distribution and the types of unsecured services leveraged to generate the attack, when studied in detail, provides with the attack matches with the Meris family of attacks. Google blocked 5,256 source IPs from 132 countries contributing to the attack. Both Kaspersky and Redware note that Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the consequent cyber-attacks have played a major role in the overall DDOS attack spike this year.
WITH RANSOMWARE AND DDOS SPREADING LIKE WILDFIRE, CYBER SECURITY IS BEING PUT TO SEVERE STRESS.
Sanjay Sahay