DDoS attack prevalence examined

Distributed denial-of-service attacks may have been fewer last year than in 2020 but continued to be more prevalent than prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to TechRepublic. NexusGuard researchers also reported that while the average DDoS attack size also declined by 50% between 2020 and 2021, the maximum size of attacks rose by 297% during the same period. Moreover, UDP attacks, DNS amplification attacks, and TCP acknowledgment attacks were the most prevalent attack vectors during the past year."While the number and average size of DDoS attacks fell in 2021 over 2020, the threat level is still very high when compared to pre-pandemic levels. Attack vectors are also in flux, because while UDP attacks are still the most common, TCP ACK, which can exponentially amplify the effect of a DDoS event with a small amount of traffic, rose significantly. Organizations need to be prepared to deal with a wide array of vectors DDoS remains a persistent, elevated threat," said NexusGuard Chief Technology Officer Juniman Kasman.