DDOS Attacks
Continue to rise in Q3 2017
In the third quarter of 2017, the trends of the preceding quarters continued to develop further. In Q3, 2017, the number of DDoS attacks in China, the United States, South Korea and Russia increased. Locally there was a sharp surge in the number of attacks with in excess of 450 attacks daily and through-put of these attacks up to 15.8 million packets per second. As expected, cost of protection has needed to increase. One known example of this further investment (early September), was where six vendors entered into a $50 million contract with the Singapore government to provide DDOS mitigation services. The previous three-year contract was half that investment.
Across the quarter, the biggest success in combating DDoS attacks was the taking down of the huge WireX botnet. The botnet had been secretly working on Android devices and proliferating via legitimate Google Play applications. The collaborative actions of Google, Samsung and several large IT security vendors were required to take down the botnet. Given the current state of security (or lack there of) on the Internet of things and in micro-applications generally, similar outcomes and attacks vectors are now likely to occur on an more regular basis.