The DDoS traffic is taking advantage of remote working due to increasing connectivity worldwide.
To curb the spread of widespread coronavirus, today, remote working has become the new norm across businesses, and home-based internet connectivity is today crucial like never before. Even a majority of organizations are planning to continue a work-from-home mandate indefinitely. However, this heavy dependence on online services has surged a trend of cyber-attacks that are meant to overburden ISPs.
Cybersecurity headlines have become a common phenomenon in recent weeks. According to the latest report by Nexusguard, Q1 2020 found DDoS attacks increased by more than 278% as compared to Q1 2019. This is also higher -about 542% compared to Q4 2019. The steep rise in occurrences due to malicious attacks amid COVID-19 pandemic, DDoS attacks are interrupting service for large organizations as well as individuals alike. The ISPs globally have encountered rising challenges to curb abnormal or undetectable traffic – before they turn out as insurgent attacks in reflection.
The Rise in Abnormal Internet Traffic Prototypes
In addition to the typical DDoS attacks, security researchers have come across several unusual internet traffic patterns. During Q1 2020, different abnormal traffic patterns like short attacks dubbed “invisible killers” were found to have increased. Often, such attacks are overlooked by ISPs and lead to havoc – enabling the invisible anomalies the access to websites and other online services networks.
Hackers Are Targeting Collaborative Services amid Rising in Remote Working
The Nexusguard study also indicated that these multiple small attacks continue to infiltrate the usual threshold-based detection. Besides, such attacks are the outcome of the ongoing hit of junk traffic to a substantial IP pool. This can obstruct the target when the small attacks begin to accumulate from various IPs. As per statistics, nearly 90% of the cyber-attacks are carried out via a single-vector approach – and it is an alteration from the commonness of the multi-vector attacks from the past.
As mentioned by Juniman Kasman, CTO at Nexusguard in the company blog post – “We believe the small ‘invisible killer’ attacks are not isolated cases, but ongoing trends which can no longer be dismissed at the risk of internet network infrastructure suffering a deluge of attacks…It’s imperative that internet service providers take the initiative to address any suspicious traffic—irrespective of size or quantity—to ensure customers don’t experience outages from DDoS attacks.”
