DDoS Peak Size Declines, but Attacks Slam Media, Entertainment Sites

There was some good news concerning DDoS attacks in Q2—the average peak attack size declined. But attacks still slammed the media and entertainment industry. Here are highlights of Verisign’s latest DDoS trends report.

Among the disturbing trends reported by Verisign is that most attacks in the second quarter were at 1G bps or more of attack bandwidth. Thirty-two percent of attacks consumed 10G bps or more of bandwidth.

In the second quarter, the average peak attack size was reported at 17.37G bps, which is a sequential decline from the 19.37G bps reported in the first quarter of 2016. That said, on a year-over-year basis, there was a 214 percent increase in the average peak attack size.

There are multiple techniques that attackers can use in DDoS attacks, though of the most common remains UDP (User Datagram Protocol) flood, which accounted for 56 percent of attacks.

Verisign reported that 64 percent of attacks employed multiple attack types, with 9 percent making use of five or more attack types in a combined DDoS operation.

During the second quarter, the largest volumetric attack observed by Verisign hit a peak of 256G bps.

When measured in terms of average attack size, the media and entertainment industry was the big target again in the second quarter. Verisign reported that the average attack size for media and entertainment content in the second quarter was 67.8G bps.

Although the largest DDoS attacks occurred against the media and entertainment industry, Verisign reported that 45 percent of the DDoS attacks it mitigated in the second quarter were for its IT services, cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) customers.