DDoS Attacks Doubled in Q2 Compared with Prior Quarter

DDoS Attacks Doubled in Q2 Compared with Prior Quarter
Most attacks were small, but the big ones got bigger than ever, Cloudflare says.

The number of network layer–distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks — like almost every other threat category in recent months — doubled last quarter compared with the previous three months.


Between April and June, security vendor Cloudflare observed an increase in the number of both small and large DDoS attacks, growth in attack sizes, and average duration of attacks. Security researchers have reported similar increases in phishing, business email compromise (BEC), ransomware, and other attacks in the months since the COVID-19 pandemic forced a large-scale shift to remote work at many organizations around the world.


Nearly 90% of the DoS attacks that Cloudflare helped its customers mitigate last quarter were relatively small and topped out at under 10 Gbit/s. More than three-quarters (76%) of the attacks peaked at less than 1 million packets per second and 83% lasted between 30 and 60 minutes.


"The trends that we saw in first-quarter 2020 of increasing DDoS attacks continued and even accelerated over the last few months," says John Graham-Cumming, CTO at Cloudflare. "The number of Layer3/Layer 4 DDoS attacks observed over our network doubled compared to that in the first three months of the year," he says.


Cloudflare attributed the increase in smaller, short-duration attacks to the increased availability of inexpensive DDoS-for-hire-services that allow almost anyone to launch attacks quickly.


At the same time, Cloudflare researchers observed an increase in larger, high-volume DDoS attacks as well, in the second quarter of 2020. In fact, 88% of attacks involving more than 100 Gbit/s of DDoS traffic were launched after COVID-19-related shelter-in-place mandates went into effect.


The biggest attack that Cloudflare mitigated last quarter involved some 754 million packets per second at its peak. The attack lasted four days b ..

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