In late 2021, there was a significant increase in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that demand a ransomto stop the attack.
During that time, about a quarter of Cloudflare targeted by a DDoS attack said they received a ransom note from the attacker.
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A large portion of these attacks occurred in December 2021. According to Cloudflare , the number of reported DDoS attacks with ransom demands doubled compared to the previous month . The company claims that 2021 was the year with the most such attacks (29% increase over the previous year).
DDoS attacks with extortion or DDoS attacks with ransom (RDDoS) began to become a new threat in August 2020. Over time, they have become more frequent, large, and sophisticated.
Last September, a threat actor deployed an RDDoS against voice-over-Internet provider VoIP.ms, disrupting phone services as the company's DNS servers became inaccessible.
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Large DDoS attacks
Cloudflare says that application-layer DDoS attacks, specifically HTTP DDoS attacks, targeted manufacturing companies and saw a 641% increase compared to the third quarter of 2021.
Looking at IP addresses, most DDoS attacks originate from China, the US, Brazil and India, and appear to have been deployed by botnets such as Meris, which also targeted Russia's Yandex.
However, there are also network-layer DDoS attacks. Unlike an application-layer DDoS, which denies users access to a service, a network-layer DDoS attack targets a company's entire network infrastructure, attempting to affect routers and servers.
One of the largest DDoS attacks mitigated by Cloudflare lasted 60 seconds and came from a botnet of 15,000 systems that launched nearly 2 Tbps of junk packets at a customer.
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While this is not the largest DDoS attack recorded to date, “terabit-strong attacks are becoming the norm,” says Cloudflare.
According to the company, a huge increase has been observed in SNMP, MSSQL and UDP-based DdoS attacks.
Source: Bleeping Computer
