Attackers targeted COVID-era lifelines such as e-commerce, healthcare, and educational services with short, complex, high-throughput attacks designed to quickly overwhelm and take down targeted entities. The impact of this activity is significant; ASERT measured just how much DDoS traffic crosses global and regional infrastructure—traffic that we all pay for.

• Number of Attacks in 1H 2020

  0.00M
  0%

  Increase from 2019

  0%

  Increase during the height of pandemic lockdown

• Top COVID-Era Targets

  • E-commerce
  • Healthcare
  • Educational services

Cybercriminals pounced on pandemic-driven vulnerabilities, launching an unprecedented number of shorter, faster, more complex attacks designed to increase ROI.

Attacks were also more complex, as 15-plus vector attacks spiked 2,851 percent in popularity since 2017. Three years ago, such attacks were considered outliers. Now, they are one of the most potent weapons in the DDoS attack arsenal. Meanwhile, we saw single-vector attacks drop 43 percent year over year.

The stat that really caught our eye was the sheer magnitude of bandwidth and throughput consumed by DDoS attacks overall—traffic that we all pay for. But how much traffic on the global internet is due solely to DDoS attacks? To find out, we created the DDoS Attack Coefficient (DAC). DAC represents the total sum of DDoS traffic traversing any given region or country in one minute. This traffic imposes an unending DDoS tax on every internet-connected organization and individual around the world. If we observed no DDoS attacks in a region for a one-minute interval, the DAC would be zero. But that’s not what we saw.

Those attacks consumed enormous amounts of bandwidth and throughput—and both service providers and enterprises must absorb that traffic as a cost of doing business in the digital economy. But then, cybersecurity math has always favored the bad guys. The latest example is the trend towards fast but complex multivector attacks. Such scenarios only highlight the vital role of advanced and automated DDoS technology.

Shorter Duration

+ Increased Complexity

Less time to respond to increasingly difficult-to-mitigate attacks