Arbor records largest ever distributed denial-of-service attack in Q1

Arbor’s data is gathered through Atlas, a collaborative partnership with more than 330 service provider customers who share anonymous traffic data with Arbor.

Dubai: To mark their presence at GISEC 2015, Arbor Networks, a leading provider of DDoS and advanced threat protection solutions for enterprise and service provider networks, released Q1 2015 global DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack data on Tuesday. This data shows a continuation of extremely high volume attacks, including the largest attack ever recorded by Arbor’s Atlas threat intelligence infrastructure, a 334Gbps attack targeting a network operator Asia. In Q1 2015, there were 25 attacks larger than 100Gbps globally.

“Attacks that are significantly above the 200Gbps level can be extremely dangerous for network operators and can cause collateral damage across service provider, cloud hosting and enterprise networks,” said Darren Anstee, director, Solutions Architects, for Arbor Networks. “DDoS attacks continue to evolve. Not only have volumetric attacks grown significantly in size and frequency over the past 18 months, application-layer attackers are also still pervasive.  In order to deal with the full scope of the modern DDoS threat we strongly recommend a multi-layered defense, one that integrates on-premise protection against application-layer attacks with cloud-based protection against higher magnitude Volumetric attacks.  Only then is an organization fully protected from DDoS attacks today.”

In the past year, Arbor has documented a dramatic increase in DDoS activity. The majority of recent very large attacks leverage a reflection amplification technique using the Network Time Protocol (NTP), Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) and DNS servers, with large numbers of significant attacks being detected all around the world.

Arbor’s data is gathered through Atlas, a collaborative partnership with more than 330 service provider customers who share anonymous traffic data with Arbor in order to deliver a comprehensive, aggregated view of global traffic and threats. Atlas collects statistics that represent 120Tbps of Internet traffic and provides the data for the Digital Attack Map, a visualisation of global attack traffic created in collaboration with Google Ideas.

sandhya@khaleejtimes.com