India among top 10 source countries of DDoS attacks: Akamai Technologies’ report

19 Aug 2015

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India is among the top 10 countries from where DDoS attacks originated, according to Akamai Technologies' Q2 2015 State of the Internet.

About 7.43 per cent of the DDoS attacks, originated from India this quarter, while China accounted for the largest at 37.01 per cent.

Globally the past three quarters had seen a doubling in the number of DDoS attacks year over year. And even as attackers favoured less powerful but longer duration attacks this quarter, the number of dangerous mega attacks continued to increase.

Q2 2015 saw 12 attacks peaking at over 100 Gigabits per second (Gbps) and five attacks peaking at more than 50 Million packets per second (Mpps).

"Very few organisations have the capacity to withstand such attacks on their own," the company said.

The largest DDoS attack of Q2 2015 measured over 240 gigabits per second (Gbps) and lasted for over 13 hours.

Peak bandwidth was typically constrained to a one to two hour window.

The highest packet rate attacks ever recorded across the Prolexic Routed network in Q2 2015 also saw one of the highest, which peaked at 214 Mpps.

That attack volume was capable of taking out tier 1 routers, such as those used by Internet service providers (ISPs).

According to the report, attacks were not only getting bigger in terms of total traffic, but were more aggressively exploiting limitations in older protocols ("infrastructure layer" attacks), and were happening at a large enough scale as to even occasionally cause the internet backbone hardware to gum up.

Infrastructure attacks involved abuse of limitations in existing protocols to flood victims with spurious data requests.

Three of the protocols in the report that showed increased activity -- RIPv1, CHARGEN, and NTP were older or outright obsolete protocols.

While the Linux Foundation was spearheading attempts to fix the protocols, such repairs did not come on short notice.

Additionally, DDoS attacks were reaching the point where they were routinely threatening to cripple internet border edge routers by their sheer size and volume alone.

"Attack campaigns [of 50 megapackets per second or more] can exhaust ternary content addressable memory (TCAM) resources in border edge routers, such as those used by Internet service providers.... This can then result in collateral damage across the ISP's network, which can manage production traffic for hundreds or thousands of organizations."

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