Arbor Networks Q1 DDoS Attack Data

Arbor Networks Q1 DDoS Attack Data Shows Fragmentation Attacks Dominate in New Zealand

Arbor Networks Inc. , a leading provider of DDoS and advanced threat protection solutions for enterprise and service provider networks, today released Q1 DDoS attack data showing that fragmentation attacks dominate in New Zealand and that while attacks here are fairly small in comparison to the rest of Asia-Pacific, they are still damaging. Attackers in New Zealand are increasingly gravitating towards reflection/amplification attacks as their threat vector of choice for larger attacks.

In the past year, Arbor has documented a dramatic increase in DDoS attack size and activity. The majority of these very large attacks leverage a reflection amplification technique using the Network Time Protocol (NTP), Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) and DNS servers, with large numbers of significant attacks being detected all around the world.

Reflection amplification is a technique that allows an attacker to both magnify the amount of traffic they can generate, and obfuscate the original sources of that attack traffic. This technique relies on two unfortunate realities: firstly, around a half of service providers do not implement filters at the edge of their network to block traffic with a ‘forged’ (spoofed) source IP address; secondly, there are plenty of poorly configured and poorly protected devices on the Internet providing UDP services that offer an amplification factor between a query sent to them and the response which is generated.
Other Q1 DDoS data of note for New Zealand:

• New Zealand had a higher proportion of attacks under 1Gbps (92%) compared to the rest of APAC (89%) in Q1 2015
• SSDP and NTP top the list of attack types in Q1 2015 with the largest reflection attack of 10.44 Gbps (SSDP) targeted at port 80, this destination port only made up 4% of the attacks compared with 18% in Asia-Pacific
• Most (86%) of New Zealand’s attack destination ports were fragmentation attacks (port 0) compared with just 8% for Asia-Pacific
• The average attack length was much shorter than most of Asia-Pacific at just over 12 minutes versus 46 minutes and 98% were less than an hour.

“The domination of fragmentation attacks reported in Q1 in New Zealand is interesting and they are likely to be resulting from various reflection/amplification attacks. Fragmentation attacks are nothing new, but it does demonstrate the attackers are constantly changing attack vectors in an effort to evade expectations so Kiwi organisations require automated defenses to protect against them,” said Nick Race, New Zealand country manager for Arbor Networks. “Operators in New Zealand absolutely should take note. On-premise DDoS protection is essential for both detection and mitigation of attacks, enabling bad traffic to be scrubbed in an immediate and automated fashion. Additionally, integrating that on-premises protection to the cloud is also critical; this is where Arbor’s Cloud Signaling technology plays an important role.”

Arbor’s data is gathered through ATLAS, a collaborative partnership with more than 330 service provider customers who share anonymous traffic data with Arbor in order to deliver a comprehensive, aggregated view of global traffic and threats. ATLAS collects statistics that represent 120Tbps of Internet traffic and provides the data for the Digital Attack Map, a visualisation of global attack traffic created in collaboration with Google Ideas.

ENDS

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