​DDoS attacks reach 500Gbps

The size of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks globally continues to grow, with the largest being 500 gigabits per second according to the latest report by Arbor Networks.

This was up from 400 Gbps reported in 2014.

Other respondents in an Arbor Networks survey of network operators reported attacks of 450, 425 and 337gigabits per second. Another five respondents reported attacks of 200 Gbps or more.

Two hundred and twenty three attacks over 100Gbps were monitored.

The vendor surveyed 354 global network operators from the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific and Oceania.

Over half of enterprises and data centres reported firewall and IPS devices failing as a result of a distributed denial of service attack.

About half of data centre operators experienced DDoS attacks which took up their entire Internet bandwidth- up from 33 per cent last year.

DDoS attacks against DNS infrastructure that resulted in a customer visible outage were up from 17 per cent last year to 30 per cent this year.

However, 17 per cent of service providers and 26 per cent of enterprises still had no dedicated DNS security resources, the report found.

Over half of respondents had firewall/IPS devices fail or contribute to an outage during a DDoS attack.

Sixty five per cent of attacks were volumetric. The report found that reflection amplification attacks were still a key issue. Respondents said that DNS was the most common protocol, closely followed by NTP.

In 2015, the vendor found that the average Australian DDoS attack in Q1 of 2015 was 1.25Gbps, compared with the APAC average of 483.65Mb/s.

This was a dip from Q4 of 2014 where the average DDoS attack in Australia was 1.34Gbps.