Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks declined in terms of average and maximum attack size during the fourth quarter of 2018, according to the "DDoS Threat Report 2018 Q4" from cloud security company Nexusguard.
Key takeaways from the report include:
- 90 percent of DDoS attacks were less than 1 Gbps in size.
- The average DDoS attack size declined 85 percent year over year, and the maximum DDoS attack size fell 24 percent.
- The average length of a DDoS attack was more than 450 minutes, which represented a 175 percent year-over-year increase.
- The most common DDoS attack type was HTTPS flood, followed by simple service discovery protocol (SSDP) and user diagram protocol (USD).
- China was the leading source of DDoS attacks, followed by the United States and France.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is taking steps to stop DDoS attacks, too. It targeted 15 of the world's largest DDoS-for-hire websites last year and helped reduce the number of attacks caused by these "Booters" by approximately 11 percent year over year in 4Q18, Nexusguard said.
How Can MSSPs Help Organizations Address DDoS Attacks?
Security event analytics and reporting, automatic mitigation and other security services can help organizations improve their DDoS attack response and remediation strategies. Meanwhile, MSSPs can integrate these services into their portfolios to help organizations combat DDoS attacks.
Furthermore, MSSPs can offer packet captures to help organizations identify DDoS attacks and the tools used to launch these attack. They also can evaluate the health of customer networks and customers' cybersecurity strategies to ensure that their customers can proactively combat DDoS attacks and other cyber threats.
