Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are among the most impactful types of Internet security threats today, flooding organizations with traffic in an effort to restrict or disable service for legitimate traffic. The deluge of DDoS attacks is something that Arbor Networks tracks closely with its quarterly global DDoS reports, the most recent of which came out on July 22, providing data about DDoS attack trends in the second quarter of 2015. In the first quarter of 2015, 17.7 percent of all attacks were 1G bps or higher, according to Arbor. In the second quarter, that figure grew to 20.8 percent. Also growing in the most recent quarter was the average attack size—to 1.04G bps from 804.2M bps in the first quarter. However, the peak attack size of 196.35G bps in the second quarter was a 41 percent decline from the first quarter, when a 334.22G-bps peak was reported. A common attack vector for DDoS is the use of amplification reflection, which is a technique that abuses misconfigured services to grow attack bandwidth. In the second quarter, Arbor reported that the largest amplification attack size came by way of Network Time Protocol (NTP) reflection at 185.94G bps. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the key highlights from Arbor Networks' second-quarter 2015 global DDoS attack data.
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