The security provider has analyzed collected data from its customers during DDoS attacks between April 2015 and March 2016. The results indicate that there is a 211% increase in the number of these types of attacks. A lot of them employ hit-and-run tactics by the criminals.
A Large Number of DDoS Attacks Are Hit-And-Run
The analysis made by Imperva was made possible by collected data from the company’s customers while mitigating DDoS attacks on their networks. The average number of mitigations was about 445 attacks peer week over the studied period. The hit-and-run tactics have become increasingly popular for cyber criminals as it allows them to execute numerous consecutive bursts. One of the main objectives of the criminals is not only to cause damage, alerting the security personnel for a long period also has a great financial impact. Attackers can cause several consequent points of intrusion which could divert attention from other types of criminal activity against the targets. As the level of sophistication grows, so are the malicious schemes that the criminals utilize.
According to the report, criminals have realized that large distributed attacks may no longer be successful, that’s one of the reasons for this change of operation. In the last few years, there has been an increase of criminal services that use botnets to direct DDoS attacks against victims. The criminals pay botnet owners to launch campaigns over set times against the targets.
Companies that depend on server uptime such as e-commerce sites, game servers, and web services are the most vulnerable to DDoS attacks, especially with hit-and-run tactics. While many of them may not succeed in bringing down their servers, they may cause temporary disturbances that result in financial loss for the companies. In terms of quantity most intrusion attempts (60%) are application-layer, while the most massive attacks are network-layer.
The full report is available on Imperva’s website.
