Netscout has announced findings from its bi-annual Threat Intelligence Report that underscore the dramatic impact cyberattacks continue to have on public and private organizations and governments around the world. In the first half of 2021, cybercriminals launched approximately 5.4 million distributed denial of service ( DDoS ) attacks, an 11% increase over the figures for the first half of 2020. Additionally, data projections from the Team NETSCOUT’s Active Level Threat Analysis System (ATLAS™) Security Engineering and Response Team (ASERT) point to 2021 as another record year on track to exceed 11 million global DDoS attacks. ASERT expects this long tail of attacker innovation to last, fueling a growing cybersecurity crisis that will continue to plague public and private organizations.
In the aftermath of Colonial Pipeline, JBS, Harris Federation , the Australian Broadcaster Channel Nine , CNA Financial , and several other high-profile attacks, the impact of DDoS and other cybersecurity attacks has been felt around the world. As a result, leading governments are introducing new programs and policies to defend against attacks, and law enforcement organizations are launching unprecedented collaborative efforts to address the crisis.
During the first half of 2020, seven new reflection/amplification DDoS attack vectors were used and exploited by cybercriminals , putting organizations at increased risk. This attack vector explosion spurred an increase in DDoS attacks multi -vector with a record of 31 attack vectors deployed in a single attack against an organization.
Other key findings of the report:
DDoS attack techniques evade traditional defenses. By customizing their strategies, cybercriminals built their attack efforts to bypass static cloud-based and local DDoS defenses to target commercial banks and credit card processors.
-Increasingly attacked connectivity supply chain. Bad actors looking to cause the most collateral damage focused their efforts on vital Internet components, including DNS servers, Virtual Private Network (VPN) hubs, Internet exchanges and services, disrupting essential gateways.
-Cybercriminals add DDoS to their toolkit to launch triple extortion campaigns. Ransomware has become big business, with extortionists adding DDoS to their attack regimen to increase pressure on victims and add stress to security teams. Triple extortion combines file encryption, data theft, and DDoS attacks , increasing the chance that cybercriminals will receive payments.
