Of all the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that happened in the first quarter of 2021, the biggest percentage targeted the telecommunications industry, a new report from Cloudflare suggests.
Laying out the results in a blog post, Cloudflare’s Vivek Ganti and Omer Yoachimik said that 0.022 percent of attack traffic targeted telecoms, followed by consumer services (0.014 percent) and security and investigation (0.009 percent).
The country with the highest percentage of HTTP attack traffic was China. The same country hosted the most attacked internet properties, as well. Across both metrics, the US placed second.
Of the first three months of the year, January was the busiest, with almost 44 percent of all attacks occurring in the first 30 days of the year. Top emerging threats include attacks targeting Jenkins and TeamSpeak3 servers, which increased by 940 percent and 203 percent quarter-on-quarter, respectively.
Most attacks were smaller in size, but this didn’t make them any less dangerous. Almost all (more than 97 percent) of the L3/4 attacks observed were smaller than 1 Mpps and 500 Mbps. Cloudflare says this is a continuation of a last year’s trend, but added that these attacks should not be taken lightly.
“Attacks under 500 Mbps are often sufficient to create major disruptions for Internet properties that are not protected by a cloud-based DDoS protection service,” explained Ganti and Yoachimik.
“Many organizations have uplinks provided by their service providers with less bandwidth capacity than 1 Gbps. Assuming their public-facing network interface also serves legitimate traffic, you can see how even DDoS attacks under 500 Mbps can easily take down Internet properties.”
