DDoS Attacks Around the Globe Increase Exponentially by 90% in the Last Year

Attacks from relentless hackers on websites that end up bringing the sites down have increased at alarming rates, about a 90% increase, in just the last year.

The Internet in its vast and endless capacity has countless sites that make up a virtual playground for hackers to target websites and ultimately bring them down from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Such attacks are nothing new, which allow hackers to easily take down a website and make it unavailable to the world by driving insurmountable amounts of traffic to the victimized site.

DDoS attacks have increased by 90% in the past year from Q4 2013 and by as much as 57% compared to the last quarter. Basically, DDoS attacks have had a big impact on the threat landscape when compared with any other type of attack on a website.

Through the use of malicious traffic, attackers are able to bring down sites through a flood of simultaneous hits that most common web servers cannot handle. In the end, web servers succumb to a DDoS attack and the website is then taken offline temporarily until the webmaster or service provider can bring it back up by a restart or other reallocation methods.

Attack durations have increased at alarming rates, too. During the last quarter of 2013 attack durations increased by 31% up to a total of 29 hours. Before then the durations lasted only 22 hours giving websites and servers a fighting chance within a full day's time. On a global scale, including the major attack areas of the US accounting for 31.54 percent of attacks and China with 17.61 percent of attacks, DDoS attacks are highly targeted. Following the US and China in attack rates are Brazil, Russia and India, who all are dominating countries when it comes to getting DDoS attacks.

Throwing the exploitation of website vulnerabilities into the mix of things, and we have an even greater reason for hackers to attack sites, which has contributed to the major increase in DDoS attacks. During the brunt of DDoS attacks, the gaming industry was the bullseye of the target for getting DDoS attacks as the chart below demonstrates comparing other industries.

DDoS attack rates by industries in Q4 2014 - Source: Akamai

As a quick explaining for the explosion of DDoS attacks on gaming systems and sites, it is prudent to mention that such entities are open and fueled by malicious parties who want to gain attention in the media or on large peer groups and forums. Not to mention, gaming networks on some of the largest gaming consoles are left open in ways to easily allow attacks from those who have the proper know-how and resources to do so.

DDoS attacks continue to be a major thorn in the side of webmasters across the globe. There are a few security and preventative measures that can be used to help limit the attacks. As the attack rates continue to rise, we expect more companies in all areas of the world to start funding new and advanced protection methods.