While the number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks remained relatively flat in the first quarter of 2021, the scale of attacks grew by almost a third (31 percent) quarter-on-quarter, showing that DDoS attacks are still a major threat to businesses.
These were the findings published in the Q1 DDoS Attack Report from cybersecurity firm Radware, which suggests the largest attack was 295Gbps strong, up from 260Gbps the quarter before. The number of heavy-hitting attacks (those 10Gbps and up) more than tripled in the same timeframe.
DDoS attacks are usually followed by an extortion attempt, the report further added. Criminals usually reach out to the target during the attack, demanding payment in cryptocurrency in exchange for the assault to stop.
No industry was spared, but healthcare has been particularly interesting to the criminals, mostly due to Covid-19 putting organizations in the sector under increased strain. Operators often attack during the busiest hours, in order to cause the most damage and motivate victims to act quickly to remedy the problem.
On-premise mitigation thwarted more than 85 percent of attacks, while five percent of the attacks mitigated in the cloud represent almost all (92 percent) of the total volume and almost 84 percent of the packets.
More than half of the attack volume targeted HTTPS, while almost a fifth (20 percent) targeted HTTP. DNS and NTP made up roughly 10 percent of attack volume.
