DDoS attacks scaling up alarmingly, says Arbor

DDoS and advanced threat protection solutions provider Arbor Networks has warned that the size of DDoS attacks have increased alarmingly this year.

The company has released data on global distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack trends for the first three quarters of 2013, which shows that 54% of attacks so far this year are over 1Gb/sec, up from 33% in 2012, and 37% of attacks so far this year are  in the 2 - 10 Gb/sec range, up from 15% last year.

The average size of a DDoS attack in 2013 is up 78%, to 2.64Gb/sec, although the majority of attacts (87%) last less than one hour.

Arbor Networks says that it has increased the scale of its Active Threat Level Analysis System (ATLAS) to match the increase in DDoS attacks.

ATLAS is a collaborative effort with over 275 service providers who have agreed to share anonymous traffic and attack data on an hourly basis with Arbor's Security Engineering & Response Team (ASERT). This data is collated along with information gathered by Arbor's global honeypot network, data from malware/attack tool research, and information from third-party security organisations. The ASERT analyse all of this information and provide threat intelligence information back to the broader security community, and intelligence feeds which can be used within Arbor products to help protect our customers from the latest threats.

"Arbor Networks' ATLAS system gives tremendous visibility into Internet traffic patterns and threat evolution. As more service provider customers participate, we gain even more visibility into what is going on out there. Much like the growth in DDoS attacks themselves, we've seen tremendous growth in ATLAS. In Q2, ATLAS monitored 47Tb/sec of peak IPv4 traffic. In Q3, that number rose 46% to 69Tb/sec. This is a significant portion of all Internet traffic, and provides Arbor researchers, customers with a truly unique view of the global attack landscape," said Darren Anstee, Solutions Architect for Arbor Networks.