France Getting Battered By DDoS Attacks

As the UK enjoys a relatively low volume of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, France is seeing deluges of traffic hitting organisations frequently, according to research.

Major hosting providers, including the hugely-polular, OVH have attracted DDoSers to France, which was only outdone by the US in terms of the amount of DDoS traffic passing through the countries’ networks, according to Arbor Networks.

A record 325Gbps attack hit France this year, but it is not known who was involved.

DDoS threat getting bigger and bigger

Darren Anstee, director of solutions architects at Arbor, said France was being attacked largely because of the popularity of those hosting providers.

“They’ve got a lot of big hosting providers and some of those are used by the gaming industry [which is subject to significant sized attacks],” he told TechWeekEurope.

Arbor spotted an unprecedented rise in DDoS attacks over the first quarter of 2014. It saw 72 attacks larger than 100Gbps and 1.5 times the number of attacks over 20Gbps as in the whole of 2013.

The epic increase in attack size has come as a result of what’s known as amplification. Protocols such as Network Time Protocol can be used to generate massive DDoS attacks with relatively little effort on behalf of the offenders.

They can abuse vulnerable NTP servers by spoofing the IP address of a target, sending small requests and getting massive responses. The target IP is then flooded with that traffic.

Even protocols used by popular gaming services, from Quake to the Steam protocol, can be abused for amplification purposes.

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