Looking at the historical landscape clearly shows cyber perpetrators dogged pursuit of stronger firepower. Two waves of amplification attacks have come to the forefront recently: The first wave consisted of DNSSEC Amplification attacks observed in our Q4 2017 Threat Report, while the second one appeared this quarter in the form of Memcached attacks.
- DNS Amplification attacks surged 201.42% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) and 660.92% year-on-year (YoY).
- 55 of the attacks were due to exploited Memcached servers.
- The amplification factor of attacks leveraging Memcached servers can go as high as 51,000X.
- Two-vector attacks were primarily NTP and DNS Amplification attacks using UDP in a volumetric role.