Verisign, a global leader in domain names and internet security, has released its third-quarter report, and it reveals that User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flood attacks make up 49% of the total attacks in the quarter. The most common UDP floods mitigated were Domain Name System (DNS) reflection attacks, followed by Network Time Protocol (NTP) reflection attacks.
The highest intensity flood attack in Q3 2016 was a TCP SYN flood that peaked at approximately 60 Gigabits per second (Gbps) and 150 Million packets per second (Mpps). This flood attack is one of the highest packets per second attacks ever observed by Verisign, surpassing the previous flood of 125 Mpps mitigated by Verisign in Q4 2015.
Verisign reports that the number of attacks went down by 13% in the July-September quarter, compared to the same three months in 2015. But the average attack peak size was 82% higher than the same time last year.
The biggest attack seen by Verisign had a volume of 257 Gbps with a speed of 152 million packets per second, which was the highest intensity flood ever recorded by the company. The average peak attack size was 12.78 Gbps and 16% of the attacks were over 10 Gbps. About 81% of the attacks peaked at over 1 Gbps and 30 percent peaked at over 5 Gbps.
“Attackers in Q3 2016 launched sustained and repeated attacks against their targets. In fact, out of all the Verisign customers targeted by DDoS attacks in Q3 2016, 41% were targeted multiple times during the quarter,” says the company.
The full report can be obtained at Verisign.com.
