Arbor Networks Inc. , a leading provider of DDoS and advanced threat protection solutions for enterprise and service provider networks, has released Q1 DDoS attack data showing that DDoS attack activity in Australia is shorter in duration, but still just as dangerous. Attackers in Australia are also continuing to gravitate towards reflection/amplification attacks as their threat vector of choice for larger attacks.
In the past year, Arbor has documented a dramatic increase in DDoS attack size and activity. The majority of these very large attacks leverage a reflection amplification technique using the Network Time Protocol (NTP), Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) and DNS servers, with large numbers of significant attacks being detected all around the world.
Reflection amplification is a technique that allows an attacker to both magnify the amount of traffic they can generate, and obfuscate the original sources of that attack traffic. This technique relies on two unfortunate realities: firstly, around a half of service providers do not implement filters at the edge of their network to block traffic with a ‘forged’ (spoofed) source IP address; secondly, there are plenty of poorly configured and poorly protected devices on the Internet providing UDP services that offer an amplification factor between a query sent to them and the response which is generated.
Other Q1 DDoS data of note for Australia:
- The average size attack in Q1 2015 was 1.25Gbps. Approximately twice as big as the average attack in Asia-Pacific
- SSDP tops the list of reflection attacks in Q1 with the largest SSDP attack reported at 26Gbps; the largest NTP reflection attack was 51Gbps
- The average attack length was 22 minutes versus 46 minutes in Asia-Pacific.
“The short duration of attacks reported in Q1 is interesting. Short bursts of DDoS attack activity require automated defenses to protect against them,” said Nick Race, Australia country manager for Arbor Networks. “Operators in Australia absolutely should take note. On-premise DDoS protection is essential for both detection and mitigation of attacks, enabling bad traffic to be scrubbed in an immediate and automated fashion. Additionally, integrating that on-premises protection to the cloud is also critical; this is where Arbor’s Cloud Signaling technology plays an important role.”
Arbor’s data is gathered through ATLAS, a collaborative partnership with more than 330 service provider customers who share anonymous traffic data with Arbor in order to deliver a comprehensive, aggregated view of global traffic and threats. ATLAS collects statistics that represent 120Tbps of Internet traffic and provides the data for the Digital Attack Map, a visualisation of global attack traffic created in collaboration with Google Ideas.
About Arbor Networks
Arbor Networks, Inc. helps secure the world’s largest enterprise and service provider networks from DDoS attacks and advanced threats. Arbor is the world’s leading provider of DDoS protection in the enterprise, carrier and mobile market segments, according to Infonetics Research. Arbor’s advanced threat solutions deliver complete network visibility through a combination of packet capture and NetFlow technology, enabling the rapid detection and mitigation of malware and malicious insiders. Arbor also delivers market leading analytics for dynamic incident response, historical analysis, visualisation and forensics. Arbor strives to be a “force multiplier,” making network and security teams the experts. Our goal is to provide a richer picture into networks and more security context – so customers can solve problems faster and reduce the risk to their business.
To learn more about Arbor products and services, please visit our website at arbornetworks.com. Arbor’s research, analysis and insight, together with data from the ATLAS global threat intelligence system, can be found at the ATLAS Threat Portal
