The total number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) have increased 88% during the third quarter (Q3) of 2012 when compared to the same quarter in 2011, according to a new report.
Prolexic’Quarterly Global DDoS Attack Report revealed that DDoS attacks with an average bandwidth of over 20Gigabits per second (Gbps) have become normal in 2012, as seven firms have suffered through the attacks in past three months.
Prolexic president Stuart Scholly said in 2011, a DDoS attack in excess of 20 Gigabits per second was not able, but today it seems commonplace.
"To put this in perspective, very few enterprises in the world have a network infrastructure with the capacity to withstand bandwidth floods of this size," Scholly said.
Several recent DDoS attacks have been compromised with the PHP-based bot toolkit known as itsoknoproblembro that has been used in high-profile DDoS attacks.
During Q3 period, the average attack bandwidth was 4.9Gbps, representing a 230% rise over the previous year, and 11% increase compared to Q2 2012.
According to report, the average attack duration during Q3 was 19 hours, which is slightly more than when compared to the second quarter.
The majority of attacks of about 81% have aimed the infrastructure layer, while 18.6% of attacks had targeted the application layer, protocols that are used by particular applications.
The report also revealed that China has the highest DDoS attack traffic of 35%, followed by the US with 27% of attacks, the UK with 3% and Saudi Arabia 4% attacks.