Cyberattacks totalled 24m during the second quarter of 2013, according to a report from cloud security firm FireHost.
The hackers combined different techniques to quickly and stealthily steal data, install malware on servers, assimilate new botnet zombies or simply take down a site.
The report said that such blended, automated attacks are being increasingly used from within cloud service provider networks.
During the second quarter, the volume of Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks grew 16% compared to the first quarter of 2013, while SQL Injection attacks rose 28% during the quarter.
FireHost founder and CEO Chris Drake said that cybercriminals can easily deploy and administer powerful botnets that run on cloud infrastructure.
"Unfortunately, many cloud providers don’t adequately validate new customer sign-ups so opening accounts with fake information is quite easy," Drake added.
"Once the account is created, application programming interfaces can be leveraged to deploy a lot of computing power on fast networks, giving a person the ability to create substantial havoc with minimal effort."
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For the quarter, the FireHost IP Reputation Management (IPRM) system filtered about 10m threats, or 41% of the total number of attacks during the period, also blocking about 1.3m attackers.
FireHost’s senior security architect, Chris Hinkley, said that IPRM filters illegitimate traffic including botnet command and control servers, botnet zombies, phishing attempts, spam and other malicious sources.
"Implementing this system has helped to decrease the number of total attacks against our customers by about 40% since the last quarter, which translates to an increase in our infrastructure’s performance and efficiency," he said.
Superfecta attacks increased by 6% during the quarter, out of which 3.6m were blocked, an increase from 3.4m in the first quarter.
According to the report, the XSS was the most common Superfecta attack type in during the period with over 1.2m attacks being blocked, representing 33% of the total attacks.
The SQL Injections and CSRF attacks represent 18% and 26% of the total Superfecta attacks respectively.
