The menace of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) and smart attacks have gone up significantly in the second quarter ended June 30, 2022.
The average duration of a DDoS attack has gone up by a whopping 100 times, reaching 3,000 minutes in the quarter as against 30 minutes in the same quarter last year.
In a DDoS attack, hackers render a website dysfunctional, denying its visitors access to the site and services offered over the site.
The share of smart attacks almost broke the four-year record, accounting for nearly 50 per cent of the total
“Some of the attacks in the past quarter lasted for days or even weeks. A record was set by an attack with a duration of 41,441 minutes, which is just a little less than 29 days,” a Kaspersky report said.
“It is extremely expensive to continue an attack for such a long time, especially if it is ineffective due to being filtered by protection solutions,” Alexander Gutnikov, a security expert at Kaspersky, said.
“The extreme duration of these attacks and the growth in the number of smart and targeted DDoS attacks makes us wonder about the capabilities, professional affiliation and funding sources of the organisers,” he said.
Smart attacks thrive
The report said that every second attack in the second quarter of the calendar year was ‘smart’, meaning its organisers conducted rather sophisticated attacks on the targets.
“The share of smart attacks reached almost 50 per cent in this quarter, which was nearly a new record,” the report said.
The collapse of cryptocurrencies began with the plummet of the Terra (Luna) and has only been gaining momentum since. Various factors indicate that the tendency may continue.
For example, cryptominers are selling off farms at low prices to gamers. “This can lead to a surge in global DDoS activity,” Gutnikov explains.
How to be safe
The cybersecurity solutions company has asked organisations to validate third-party agreements and contact information, including those made with internet service providers.
“You know your traffic well. Use network and application monitoring tools to identify traffic trends and tendencies. By understanding your company’s typical traffic patterns and characteristics, you can establish a baseline to more easily identify unusual activity that is symptomatic of a DDoS attack,” he said.
“You should be in a position to rapidly restore business-critical services in the face of a DDoS attack,” he said.