DDOS attacks have increased in number and size this year, report says

By Lucian Constantin in Computer World

IDG News Service - The volume, duration and frequency of distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks used to flood websites and other systems with junk traffic have significantly increased during the first three months of this year, according to a report released Wednesday by Florida-based DDOS mitigation provider Prolexic.

The average attack bandwidth seen by Prolexic during the first quarter of 2013 was of 48.25 Gbps, an eightfold increase over the last quarter of 2012, when attack bandwidth averaged at 5.9Gbps.

The size of a high-profile attack last month against a spam-fighting organization called Spamhaus that was reported to have peaked at over 300Gbps, making it the largest in history, was grossly overestimated, Prolexic said in its report. However, Prolexic did mitigate a 130Gbps attack in March, it said.

The top source country for DDOS attacks in Q1 2013 was China, which accounted for 40.68 of botnet sourced activity and was followed by the U.S. at 21.88 percent, Germany at 10.59 percent and, surprisingly, Iran with 5.51 percent.

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