Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks fell more than 40 percent to 97,700 attacks in the third quarter of the year, according to Nexusguard's "Q3 2016 APAC Threat Report."
Nexusguard's latest report reveals there was a sharp dip in distributed reflection denial of service (DrDoS) attacks, with DNS-based attacks falling 97 percent compared to the previous quarter. Recent DDoS attacks on cybercrime journalist Brian Krebs and OVH, a French internet hosting provider, broke records for speed and size.
Nexusguard researchers attribute the reflection attack dip and these massive attacks to hackers favoring Mirai-style botnets of hijacked connected devices, demonstrating the power the internet of things (IoT) has to threaten major organizations. With increasing pressure on hosting and internet service providers to sustain fierce attacks against customers, Nexusguard analysts advise organizations to ensure they use signature-based detection to quickly identify and thwart botnets. Owners of IoT devices should protect all devices within their network with strong passwords to avoid being compromised.
"Few service providers can sustain the level of malicious traffic we saw in Q3 from IoT botnets, so these DDoS outages are causing companies to completely rethink their cybersecurity strategies," said Terrence Gareau, chief scientist for Nexusguard. "Hackers' preferences for botnets over reflection attacks are typical of cyclical behavior, where attackers will switch to methods that have fallen out of popularity to test security teams with unexpected vectors.”
China and Australia rose to the list of top three countries targeted by DDoS attacks with the largest increases in malicious traffic--50 percent and 40 percent, respectively--over last quarter. While DDoS attacks fell in average frequency during Q3, Nexusguard researchers predict the attention from recent botnet attacks will cause companies to strengthen their cybersecurity and rethink their service provider contracts in Q4 to deliver support and ensure business continuity despite supersized attacks.