New Q1 DDoS Attack Report report released by Radware finds that while the number of attacks held steady in Q1 (down 2% from Q4 2020), attack volumes increased by 31%.
The largest attack recorded was 295Gbps up from 260gbps in Q4 2020 and the occurrence of major attacks of 10Gbps or more tripled in Q1 2021 v Q4 2020.
Radware’s new quarterly report series produced by Pascal Geenens, the director of threat intelligence at Radware, provides an overview of the global attack activity by industries, applications and on-premise vs. cloud.
Follow the link to the report and the media alert follows. Please find an image to illustrate the report, charts and graphs available on request. Pascal is available for interviews to discuss the findings and implications – please call Nicky Jackson on 07870 131185 to arrange this.
Significant findings:
- Bitcoin influenced attacks – ransom DDoS was prevalent in the finance sector when extortionists started to ‘circle back’ to earlier victims who hadn’t paid ransoms with more intensive attacks. They attempts were designed to get companies to pay up so they could capitalise on the price of bitcoin.
- Healthcare was dominated by biotechnology and pharmaceutical attacks in the first half of Q1 of 2021. The activity moved to a smaller number of attacks targeting hospitals in the second half of Q1. Most of the attacks are designed to hurt during the busiest times with attacks happening during the working day in the week – very little happens at weekends.
- Finance sector attacks changed from infrequent, high-volume attacks in December and January to smaller, more frequent global attacks in March, impacting more offices and branches of multinational organisations. Organisations in finance had consistently higher concentrations of attacks during weekdays across Q4 of 2020 and Q1 of 2021.
- Government experienced high attack activity in October 2020 when it was the most attacked vertical, but the largest volumes were noted in February and March 2021. Attacks were focused on North American-based government institutions with fewer and smaller attacks in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
- Overall, largest attack recorded was 295Gbps up from 260gbps in Q4 2020 and the occurrence of major attacks of 10Gbps or more tripled in Q1 2021 v Q4 2020.
- On-premise mitigation thwarted more than 85% of attacks in Q1 of 2021. Notably, 5% of the attacks mitigated in the cloud represent over 92% of the total volume and almost 84% of the packets.
- More than 50% of the attack volume targeted HTTPS and nearly 20% targeted HTTP. DNS and NTP represented more than 10%
of attack volume.
