RDDoS attacks up 341 per cent, major services at risk

A screen shows an RDDoS cyber attack
Ransom Distributed Denial of Service (RDDoS) attacks have surged since the pandemic began

Cyber attacks have increased by 341 per cent since COVID-19 pandemic began, with some of the world’s largest firms and industries targeted through Ransom Distributed Denial-of-Service (RDDoS) attacks.

According to leading distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cybersecurity solutions provider Nexusguard‘s Annual Threat Report 2020, cyber attackers targeted industries providing connectivity, services and entertainment to populations forced to shelter-in-place.

This resulted in a 341 per cent year-over-year increase in DDoS attacks during the pandemic. The massive shift in online behavior and reliance on connectivity strained communications service providers (CSPs) and internet service providers (ISPs) that provided the backbone for this remote work, including spikes in ransom DDoS (RDDoS) attacks to extort organisations for payment in exchange for staying online.

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With lockdown and social distancing measures enforced across the world, 2020 saw an explosion in online gaming and dependence on the internet, which were attractive targets for attackers. Motivations for the attacks ranged from financial gains, political and economic benefits, revenge, cyberwarfare to even personal enjoyment. 

Nexusguard analysts predict that RDDoS attacks will increase 30 per cent in the upcoming year. Additionally, smaller attacks (less than 10Gbps in size) will account for 99 per cent of all DDoS attacks in the near future, since they will continue to be difficult to detect and economical to deploy.

“During 2020, the pandemic forced a complete shift in how the world lived and worked, and attackers were ready to take full advantage of the situation,” Nexusguard chief technology officer Juniman Kasman said. 

“With attackers using stealthier, smaller attacks increasing in complexity, CSPs and enterprises will need deep learning, multidimensional DDoS detection and other advanced techniques to avoid outages.”

In an interview with 60 Minutes‘ Tara Brown, former National Cyber Security Adviser Alastair MacGibbon warns our increasing reliance on technology means our security will inevitably be compromised on a large scale, with far-reaching effects.

Mr MacGibbon says businesses often feel they have no choice but to pay up, with big businesses often reluctant to report attacks.

“I’d say in terms of small businesses, probably quite a lot. Big businesses don’t like talking about it,” Mr MacGibbon says.

In March, the Nine Network’s news services were thrown into chaos when it fell victim to the largest cyber attack on a media company in Australia’s history. The following month, Brisbane’s Wesley Hospital was brought to its knees by an RDDoS attack. Parent company UnitingCare Queensland confirmed the attack but declined to elaborate on how the cyber attackers succeeded in breaching the hospital’s IT security.

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With these cyber criminals targeting major infrastructure and services, it casts a worrying shadow on the security of Australia’s energy companies and their assets.

According to Nexusguard’s research, CSPs—especially ISPs—continue to be impacted by stealthy bit-and-piece attacks, which drip-feed junk traffic across a large IP pool. In 2020, 301 of these CSPs were hit by bit-and-piece attacks across 23 countries. Researchers caution that CSPs and other organisations that rely on threshold and signature-based detection methods will experience severe outages from newer, evasive DDoS attacks. 

Nexusguard’s DDoS threat research reports on attack data from botnet scanning, honeypots, CSPs and traffic moving between attackers and their targets. This is done to help companies identify vulnerabilities and stay informed about global cyber security trends. Read the full Nexusguard Annual Threat Report 2020 for more details.

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