Giant scale DDoS tops 40 Gbps

Arbor Networks has released the fourth edition of its Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, which summarizes the responses of 70 lead security engineers worldwide. The report indicates that the largest DDoS attacks have grown a hundredfold from their humble megabit beginnings in 2000, scaling to more than 40 gigabit this year. More worrisome is the statement that "the growth in attack size continues to significantly outpace the corresponding increase in underlying transmission speed and ISP infrastructure investment."

Still, it appears that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) surveyed are less worried about DDoS attacks than they were a year ago. Instead, more than half are battling an increase in service-level attacks that attempt to exploit vulnerabilities and limitations of computing resources. Chief scientist for Arbor, Craig Labovitz, explains, "Sophisticated, service-level attacks...wouldn't show up as a multigigabit DDoS. But they are still enough to cause outages on large, distributed services." Overall though, ISPs did admit that the main threat they face comes from "external, brute force attacks," or in other words, DDoS. Arbor Networks released an earlier study in August that revealed negligible IPv6 usage.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at ZDNet News
- check out this blog post at Arbor Networks
- check out this article at DarkReading

Related Article:
First comprehensive survey of IPv6 reveals negligible usage