Report finds 487% jump in DDoS attacks since 2019

The fifth anniversary of the DDoS Threat Intelligence Report by Netscout revealed that the number of application-layer and botnet-based direct-path attacks since 2019 has jumped by 487%, according to SiliconANGLE. According to the report, the largest surge took place during the second half of 2022. The distributed denial-of-service alert traffic peaked at 436 petabits and more than 75 trillion packets in one day. In the last three years, there was an 18% rise in direct-path attacks, which, combined with a nearly equal rate of increase in traditional reflection and amplification attacks, suggests a hybrid defense approach may be needed to address the fluctuating attack methodology, according to researchers. Most of the increase can be attributed to the pro-Russian group Killnet and similar groups that specifically attack websites, with the U.S. national security sector experiencing a 16,815% jump in attacks associated with Killnet. Meanwhile, more than 1.35 million bots from malware families such as Mirai, Meris, and Dvinis were tracked by Netscouts ASERT analysts and carpet-bombing attacks rose by 110% from the first half of 2022 to the second.