In the first quarter of the year, DDoS attacks rose more than 278% compared to Q1 2019 and more than 542% compared to the last quarter. While working from home has become the new norm due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, heavy use and reliance of online services has given rise to a trend of attacks employed to overwhelm Internet Service Providers (ISPs). ISPs are now faced with increasing challenges to curb abnormal traffic patterns before they turn into uncontrollable reflection attacks.
- In addition to traditional DDoS attacks, Nexusguard researchers identified various abnormal traffic patterns, including small-sized, short attacks dubbed “invisible killers.” These types of attacks are often overlooked by ISPs, which gives the invisible anomalies access to website and online services networks to cause havoc.
- Bits-and-pieces attacks continue to infiltrate traditional threshold-based detection. These attacks result from drip-feeding doses of junk traffic into a large IP pool, which can clog the target when bits and pieces start to accumulate from different IPs. 90% of attacks employed a single-vector approach, which is a change from the popularity of multi-vector attacks in the past.
