NSFOCUS Mid-Year DDoS Threat Report 2013 Details DDoS Attack Trends

NSFOCUS research team finds more than 68 percent of victims suffered multiple attacks; Media more focused on hacktivism than business crime - the true enterprise threat

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 12, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- NSFOCUS, Inc. (NSFOCUS), a global provider of solutions and services for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) detection and mitigation, today released its NSFOCUS Mid-year DDoS Threat Report 2013. The report details attack trends over the past half-year based on 168,459 incidents observed by the company's Security Research Academy, an in-house team of anti-DDoS analysts. The report also analyzes 90 major media reports on initiatives launched by hacker groups such as Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters and Anonymous, among others, focusing on the Operation Ababil and Spamhaus campaigns. Highlights of the findings include:

• Based on traffic analysis, there are 1.29 DDoS attacks occurring worldwide every two minutes, on average.
• Among the 90 major DDoS events reported by the media, hacktivism was the motivation behind 91.1 percent of attacks.
• 68.7 percent of victims suffered multiple attacks, up by nearly 30 percent compared with 2012; only 31.3 percent suffered a single DDoS attack, down from 50.7 percent the year prior.
• TCP Flood and HTTP Flood remained the most popular attack methods, accounting for 38.7 percent and 37.2 percent, respectively.
• Most attacks are short and small. The report found that 93.2 percent of DDoS attacks were less than 30 minutes in duration and 80.1 percent did not surpass a traffic rate of 50 Mbps.
• Hybrid attacks became prevalent, with ICMP+TCP+UDP Flood being the most common combination.

"Profit-driven cybercriminals pay close attention to 'hackernomics,' deploying whatever form of attack causes the most damage with minimal effort," said Frank Ip, vice president of U.S. operations for NSFOCUS. "For this reason, we expect application-layer attacks to remain the most common method of attack in the near term, and we anticipate a greater adoption of this method in the future."

The NSFOCUS Mid-year DDoS Threat Report 2013 reveals that DDoS attacks are seeing more time in the media spotlight with a heavy focus on incidents related hacktivism, such as the biggest cyber attack in history against anti-spam organizations Spamhaus. However, attacks driven by commercial competition and malicious ransom comprise a majority of all DDoS attacks. There is a clear divide between groups that utilize DDoS attacks as a form of hacktivism and groups that use them to make profit.

To obtain your copy of the report, visit http://www.nsfocus.com/en/2013/SecurityReport_0906/143.html