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DDoS-for-Hire Services Doubled in Q1

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Dark Reading

On

June 24, 2019

Impact of FBI's takedown of 15 'booter' domains last December appears to have been temporary.

New data published this week demonstrates the troubling resilience of cybercriminals against mounting domestic and international efforts to stop them.

Nexusguard analyzed data gathered from multiple public and proprietary sources on distributed denial-of-service attacks during the first quarter of this year. The security vendor discovered that so-called booter websites offering DDoS services for hire more than doubled that quarter compared to the fourth quarter of 2018 - despite a major law enforcement crackdown on such sites in December.

DNS amplification attacks—one of the most popular booter services—soared 40% quarter-over-quarter amid uninterrupted demand among cybercriminals. Many of the DNS amplification attacks—where DNS servers are tricked into generating responses that are much larger than the original queries—targeted ISPs and telecommunications firms in Brazil.

Nexusguard's analysis also showed a continued trend toward what it calls bit-and-piece DDoS attacks, where threat actors contaminate a large and diverse pool of IP address with almost negligible sizes of junk traffic that converge and block a targeted IP.