As an AMS-IX member that hosts the National Scrubbing Center against DDoS attacks (NaWas), NBIP by way of NaWas identified 540 DDoS attacks for the period compared to 307 attacks in Q3 2020.
Most of these attacks were limited in duration and about 450+ attacks took less than an hour. However, the number of prolonged attacks I.e. those that lasted more than 4 hours, went up to 21 in Q4 of 2020, from 16 in Q3 2020.
In addition, DNS amplification (43%) and LDAP amplification (26%) made up the majority of the measured attacks.
Further in the report entitled Quarterly update about DDoS attacks, the strongest attack recorded in Q4 2020 had a ‘strength’ of 167Gbps, down from 200Gbps attacks recorded in August and September of 2020.
DDOS-attacks are still the prevalent form of cybercrime and not only are the number of attacks increasing, but the attacks are also becoming more complex, at a higher volume and more generally more sophisticated.
“We see a new type of attack called carpet bombing involving a large number of individual attacks that are carried out simultaneously,” said Frank Dupker, European network manager NaWas by NBIP.
“Happily, we are able to mitigate these attacks through active ways of prefiltering.”
The biggest attack reported to date by the NaWas in 2019 with a strength of 124Gbps. On average, NaWas reported 2.5 attacks per day, per year. In Q4 2020, this increased to an average of 4 attacks per day.
In related news, November saw Nokia Deepfield publish its latest Network Intelligence Report entitled Networks in 2020. Amongst its findings, it reported a 40-50% increase in DDoS traffic.
