Do you know that Pentagon has announced that it is working to fund researchers and tools that help the organizations battle against the threat of the most common form of cyber-attack i.e. the distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS)? BGR says that Pentagon is looking to fund the researchers who can help the organizations recover from a distributed denial of service attack in maximum 10 seconds. Visit our guide to know more about the basics of how DDoS attacks work.
This program called Extreme DDoS Defense is something that is being inspired by the increasing number of DDoS attacks in recent times. DDoS attacks have become a greater threat in the second quarter of 2015, according to the latest State of the Internet report from Akamai.
Compared to this time last year, DDoS attacks have grown at an unprecedented pace of 132 percent. This increase is seven percent since the last quarter and the world has also seen 12 mega attacks that peaked at more than 1,000 Gbps and 50 million packets per second.
According the report, Mega attacks have become more common and very few organizations have the technology to defend themselves against such attacks. The largest DDoS attack was recorded last quarter that lasted for more than 13 hours and peaked at 240 Gbps.
To carry out such attacks, the unsecured home devices that connect using the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) Protocol are largely used as SSPD reflectors. Also, the world’s most popular blogging platform and content management system, WordPress is a regular and attractive target for attackers and they exploit the vulnerabilities in the third party plugins and themes.
“The threat posed by distributed denial of service (DDoS) and web application attacks continues to grow each quarter,” said John Summers, vice president of Akamai’s cloud security business unit. “Malicious actors are continually changing the game by switching tactics, seeking out new vulnerabilities and even bringing back old techniques that were considered outdated.”
According to Akamai’s, DDoS attacks have become the most commonly used method by the attackers to target an organization’s security, and cyber-criminals are deploying new tactics by seeking out new vulnerabilities.