Akamai Finds 389 Percent Increase in Bandwidth of DDoS Attacks

The average bandwidth of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks increased 389 percent between Q3 2013 and Q3 2014, Akamai Technologies said Thursday in a report (http://bit.ly/1FKpy9i). Akamai said its service defended against 17 DDoS attacks in Q3 that had traffic of more than 100 Gbps, including one at 321 Gbps. “We witnessed none of that size in the same quarter a year ago and only six” in Q2, said John Summers, Akamai vice president-Security Business Unit, in a news release. “These mega-attacks each used multiple DDoS vectors to deliver large bandwidth-consuming packets at an extremely high rate of speed.” More than half of all attacks measured in Q3 used multiple attack vectors, an 11 percent increase from Q2 and a 9 percent increase from the same period last year, Akamai said. Multi-vector attacks are increasing due to “the increased availability of attack toolkits with easy-to-use interfaces as well as a growing DDoS-for-hire criminal industry,” Akamai said (http:// bit.ly/1xenfVC).