Cyber attacks on Black Friday weekend broke records and were twice as high as last year. The companies were faced with a flood of DDoS attacks that have now exceeded the terabit limit.
The past Cyber Weekend not only attracted bargain hunters to the Internet. The latest evaluations by the IT security provider Link11 show that cyber criminals also tried to seize the opportunity. According to evaluations by the Link11 Security Operations Center (LSOC), they covered companies with DDoS attacks in order to damage them or to extort bitcoins. However, the number of attacks this year was even higher than expected and the surprising force of the attacks also set alarming records.
Massive DDoS attacks on Black Friday and Cyber Monday
During the entire cyber weekend, the LSOC registered increased DDoS attack activity in its global network. However, the perpetrators attacked particularly frequently on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Here the increase in the number of DDoS attacks was over 200% compared to the previous year. In addition to e-commerce providers, payment service providers and logistics companies, the attackers also targeted hosting and cloud providers as well as ISPs who provide the digital infrastructure for online business.
Record-breaking attack bandwidths
For applications, online services and networks that generally have high load peaks, even relatively small DDoS attacks are enough to cause overload. In order to conserve their resources, the attackers therefore usually refrain from oversized attacks and choose their attacks as small as necessary. However, on the cyber weekend, the LSOC posted a bandwidth record of 1,1 Tbps. The attack volume of the botnet attack, which targeted a hosting provider in Germany on Sunday, was generated solely via a UDP flood. If the perpetrators had also used amplifier techniques such as DNS or CLDAP reflection amplification, the attack volume would have been significantly higher. The so-called amplification factor for these very frequently used DDoS vectors is 54 for DNA and up to 70 for CLDAP.
The record attack was accompanied by numerous hyper attacks. In 20 other attacks over the cyber weekend, bandwidth peaks of over 100 Gbps were registered. If you want to profit from the sales peaks in online retail in a fail-safe manner, it is best to invest in scalable, cloud-based protection solutions that can withstand attacks in the terabit range. This means that the focus remains on the core business and the shop team is not additionally burdened by emergency measures.
More at Link11.com
Via Link11 Link11 is the leading European IT security provider in the field of cyber resilience, with headquarters in Germany and worldwide locations in Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East. The cloud-based security services are fully automated, react in real time and repel all attacks, both known and new patterns, guaranteed in less than 10 seconds. According to the unanimous opinion of analysts (Gartner, Forrester), Link11 thus offers the fastest detection and defense (TTM) available on the market. The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) identifies Link11 as a qualified DDoS protection provider for critical infrastructures. To ensure cyber resilience, web and infrastructure DDoS protection, bot management, zero-touch WAF and even secure CDN services ensure holistic and cross-platform hardening of networks and critical applications in companies.