John Layden January 10, 2022 16:06 UTC
Updated: 10 Jan 2022 16:59 UTC
Scammers try to cash out by raising the stakes
According to Cloudflare’s annual survey, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are increasingly accompanied by extortion demands on their victims.
Ransom-motivated DDoS attacks According to a study of cyberattack trends, between the third quarter of 2021 and the fourth quarter of 2021, there was a year-on-year increase of 29% and 175%.
In December alone, one in every three Cloudflare customers who responded to the survey reported being either the target of a ransomware DDoS attack or threatened by an attacker.
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Manufacturing was hit the hardest by application-layer DDoS attacks in Q4 2021, with a staggering seven-fold (641%) increase in the number of attacks. The business services and gaming/gambling industries are the second and third most targeted industries for application-layer DDoS attacks.
A new botnet called Meris botnet Cloudflare said the attack emerged in mid-2021 and was the source of multiple high-volume application-layer DDoS attacks.
Application-layer DDoS attacks typically attempt to disrupt the operation of a target organization’s web server by bombarding it with fake requests so that it can’t efficiently handle real requests or (worse) crash it.
layer by layer peeling
During the fourth quarter of 2021 (specifically November), Cloudflare documented continued extortion-motivated web-based DDoS activity against VoIP providers worldwide.
SYN flood and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) flooding is the most common attack vector, but has also seen a significant increase in SMTP-based network layer DDoS attacks during this period.
Commenting on the results, Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cummings said daily swig: “The fourth quarter was very busy with DDoS attacks on the Internet. We saw a significant increase in random DDoS attacks as well as standard network-level DDoS attacks designed to take services offline.
“It all goes to show that DDoS attacks are relatively easy to execute and that running a ransom is a way to make money.”
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