Verisign releases its Q1 2017 DDoS Trends Report that represents its view into the DDoS attack mitigations on behalf of the company's DDoS Protection Services.
The report said that the company saw a 23 percent decrease in the number of attacks in Q1 2017. But the average peak attack size has increased 26 percent compared to the previous quarter, with peak sizes at over 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps).
The largest DDoS attack observed by Verisign in Q1 2017 was a multi-vector attack that peaked at over 120Gbps, delivering 90 Million packets per second (Mpps). This attack that had a duration of more than 15 hours, flooded 60Gbps of TCP SYN and TCP RST packets to the targeted network.
he attackers were persistent, sending attack traffic on a daily basis for over two weeks.
The attack's signature, according to Verisign, used one of the signatures associated with the Mirai IoT botnet. The attack also included UDP floods and IP fragments which increased the volume of the attack.
Verisgn also reported that 57 percent of DDoS attacks that have been mitigated by the company in Q1 2017, employed multiple attack types. 46 percent of attacks were UDP Floods. TCP-based attacks made 33 percent of attack types.
The IT/Cloud/SaaS industry that represented 58 percent of mitigation activity, was the most frequently targeted industry for the tenth consecutive quarter. The Financial Sector industry experienced the second highest number of DDoS attacks, representing 28 percent of mitigation activity.
The main cause of the increase was because hackers were able to make use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices into their botnets. The Mirai botnet, for example, which attacked DynDNS in 2016, almost took the entire internet down with it.
