UK Is Leading Source Of DDoS Attacks

The United Kingdom has been identified as the leading originator of DDoS attacks, in Akamai’s latest Security State of the Internet report.

It comes after the firm had previously noticed that the frequency of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks continued to rise, as instances of “mega attacks” became more common.

DDoS Attacks

But now in the latest report covering the third quarter of 2015 (July to September), Akamai revealed the depressing news that the UK now occupies the number one spot (25.6 percent) as the top originating source country for DDoS attack traffic, compared to being third in Q2.

This time last year, the UK was not even in the top ten.

China is the second (20.7 percent) most common originating source country for DDoS attack traffic, followed by the US (17 percent), Spain (6.9 percent), India (6.9 percent) and other countries (22.9 percent).

Looking globally, it seems that the last quarter witnessed a record 1,510 DDoS attacks, a 180 percent increase over Q3 a year ago; and 23 percent more than the previous quarter.

The DDoS attacks are generally less powerful and shorter, but the firm did notice a record setting 222 Mbps attack, as well as eight mega attacks (greater than 100 Gbps).

Akamai said that “the use of reflection-based DDoS methods by DDoS-for-hire sites resulted in smaller attacks on average than we have observed from infection-based botnets.”

“Akamai has been seeing greater numbers of denial of service attacks every quarter, and the upward trend continued in the most recent quarter,” said John Summers, VP, Cloud Security Business Unit, Akamai.

“Although recent DDoS attacks were on average smaller and shorter, they still posed a significant cloud security risk,” said Summers. “Attacks are being fuelled by the easy availability of DDoS-for-hire sites that identify and abuse exposed Internet services, such as SSDP, NTP, DNS, CHARGEN, and even Quote of the Day.”

Web Application Attacks

The UK is also one of the top ten originators of web application attack traffic, occupying joint 6th place, with 3 percent.

The retail sector (55 percent) seems to bear the brunt of these types of attacks, but the online gaming, media and entertainment sector were also hit very hard during the quarter.

And it seems that the UK is also an increasingly popular target, after the report found that in the third quarter, the UK was the second most targeted country for web application attacks at seven percent of total attacks.

The top country being targeted is still the United States at 75 percent.

Are you a security pro? Try our quiz!