Distributed Denial of Service: When the Horde Attacks

                                    

Retrieved From: https://www.csoonline.com/article/3222095/ddos-explained-how-denial-of-service-attacks-are-evolving.html

TL; DR: DDoS attacks are still a popular form of attack that can cripple websites and cost companies' revenue. But this popular form of attack isn't going anywhere soon as the numbers continue to rise.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can be traced back to the mid-1990s. It was primarily used by hacktivists as a digital means to protest particular companies (Cox, 2014). But as time went on, the DDoS attack became a more refined attack that could be used as a distraction while the real target was attacked. It could also be used as a weapon by hackers to extort money from their targets or just as an attack that would cost a company thousands of dollars in damages.

            Others do it simply for bragging rights to see who can bring down the biggest entity or create the largest DDoS attack (Kightlinger, 2020). The three largest DDoS attacks ever recorded have happened in the last three years. In 2018, GitHub was hit with a massive DDoS attack that transmitted 129.6 million packets per second and the data transmission reached a staggering 1.35 terabit-per-second (Crane, 2019). Surprisingly, the GitHub DDoS attack was not the largest as it comes in third place. The two largest DDoS attacks were recorded by Imperva, a cybersecurity firm. The second largest DDoS attack transmitted 500 million packets per second with 425 billion bytes a second being transmitted (Crane, 2019). But the king of DDoS attacks comes in at 580 million packets per second with 493 billion bytes a second being transmitted (Crane, 2019).

Cost of DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks can take down the website of a large corporation and cost the company millions of dollars in lost revenue. Revenue losses from a DDoS attack can range from $100,000 an hour up to $1,000,000 an hour based on what sector the organization operates in (Korlov, 2016). These numbers are projected to rise as the DDoS attack is a simple and easy attack for hackers to use, as it only requires infected computers (Cox, 2014). In 2019, the number of DDoS attacks recorded were 8.4 million (Help Net Security, 2020). These numbers are expected to reach 17 million in 2020, more than doubling the numbers from 2019 (Wood, 2019). From these staggering numbers, it is understandably why an organization might just pay the ransom price to avoid the higher costs that are associated with a DDoS attack.

Retrieved From: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3156344/2017-widespread-sdn-adoption-and-ddos-attack-mitigation.html

Executing a DDoS Attack

To execute a DDoS attack, the attacker must first build their army of botnets. Botnets are malware-infected computers (zombies) that can be controlled by the attacker. Once the attacker has control of a large botnet army, they can direct those botnets to flood traffic to any website that they choose. If the botnet army is large enough, the traffic will overload the site and prevent anyone from accessing the organizations website. If no one can connect to the website and utilize the organizations services, then the organization is losing money.

Recently cyber security firms discovered a massive botnet named Reaper. The researchers observed more than two million infected devices (Cimpanu, 2017). The number of devices being added daily is 10,000, which is staggering (Lilly, 2017). The damage that a botnet this size could do would be massive. Since it was discovered in 2017, Reaper has not executed any known attacks yet.

But companies are not defenseless against DDoS attacks. Some tactics that companies can utilize to defend against a DDoS attack are implementing web application firewall, leverage cloud-based DDoS protection, and develop a denial of service plan in order to be prepared if an attack happens (Dobran, 2020). While these are many more options to implement and utilize to defend against a DDoS attack, these just a few examples ad to what is available.

Retrieved From: https://www.moddb.com/mods/zombies-are-coming/downloads/zombies-are-coming-revamp-v1

With the popularity of DDoS attacks on the rise, the threat of this type of attack disappearing is bleak. Companies continue to stay vigilante against the threat of DDoS attack by preparing as best they can. Cyber firms continue to monitor the Internet for the hordes of zombies (infected computers) that are under the control of malicious hackers. But in the end, no fortress can withstand the attack of zombie hordes (bots) that cannot be contained.

 

Sources

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Cox, J. (2014, October 01). The History of DDoS Attacks as a Tool of Protest.

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            https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d734pm/history-of-the-ddos-

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Crane, C. (2019, May 30). The Largest DDoS Attacks in history. Retrieved May 19, 2020, from

https://www.thesslstore.com/blog/largest-ddos-attack-in-history/

Dobran, B. (2020, March 3). 7 Proven Tactics To Prevent DDoS Attacks: Make a Security Plan

Today! Retrieved May 19, 2020, from https://phoenixnap.com/blog/prevent-ddos-attacks

Help Net Security. (2020, February 18). 8.4 million: Number of DDoS attacks researchers saw

last year alone. Retrieved May 19, 2020, from https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2020/02/19/number-ddos-attacks/

 Kightlinger, D. (2020, February 14). What Is a DDoS Attack? Retrieved May 19, 2020, from

https://securityintelligence.com/articles/what-is-a-ddos-attack/

Korolov, M. (2016, May 05). DDoS costs, damages on the rise. May 19, 2020, from

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3065999/security/ddos-

            costs-damages-on-the-rise.html

Lilly, P. (2017, October 21). IoT_reaper Botnet Looms Ready To Strike With Millions

            Of Zombie Devices At Its Disposal | HotHardware. Retrieved May 19,

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Wood, L. (2019, May 24). The World Market for DDoS Protection 2019-2024: Projected to

Grow at a CAGR of 24.9% with BFSI Expected to Hold a Significant Share - ResearchAndMarkets.com. Retrieved May 19, 2020, from https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190524005248/en/World-Market-DDoS-Protection-2019-2024-Projected-Grow