Lately there are many companies and multinationals that are seeing how it is increasingly common to receive a DDoS attack, Distributed Denial of Services, to its servers. Basically, with this attack, what is sought is to carry out an impressive number of access requests, the higher the number, the more chances of success, to a single target. Due to this action the server or target in question collapses as it cannot process all of them at once and ceases to be in service.
As you can see, it is a technique that a priori is very simple to use and that is usually the one chosen as the first option by cybercriminals who seek to make a specific server stop operating. According to the latest report published by Arbor Networks, a firm specialized in security, during the first half of 2016, DDoS attacks have increased considerably compared to last year. In turn, the data transfer rate has also increased, even surpassing the previous record that dates from 2015 when the rate was 500 Gbps. The new record has been set in the 579 Gbps.
DDoS attacks each year become stronger and more frequent.
How could it be otherwise, one of the last DDoS attacks produced has targeted directly against the Pokémon GO servers, which caused big connection problems to users, slowing down of loading processes and freezing during the game. The measure of attacks produced in a week has been 124.000 while the preferred targets are in countries such as China, Korea and the United States.
As can be read in the report:
DDoS is still a commonly used type of malware due to the easy availability of very cheap or free tools that allow launching the attack. This has led to an increase in both the frequency and the size and complexity of attacks in recent years.
As a final detail, tell you that attacks as large as the one that established the data transfer record are not usually common, indeed, the 80% of them are usually small to medium size.
Further information: ZDNet