DDoS Attacks on Rise..WFH

There is a rise in the internet usage pattern which in turn triggered the DDoS Attacks on a peak. Adopting to New normal WFH a challenge to most of the organisation

Growing stealth on internet

The pandemic effect was clear in traffic to specific websites, such as the 250% increase in queries for a popular collaboration platform as lockdowns commenced and the sharp rise in traffic to the website of  masks manufacturer.

A noticeable rise in traffic was noticed in mid-March correlating with the dates that schools and organizations began to implement isolation policies, and query numbers continued to rise afterward, with a sharp uptick about a month after isolation policies had begun to take hold.

There was a 14% increase in DNS query volumes between March 1 and May 3, as the full impact of the pandemic set in around the world.

Of course, not all industries have been affected equally. As might be expected, queries to retail companies and streaming services saw a large increase during the one-month period coinciding with the beginning of stay-at-home orders, while the travel industry saw decline initially but appears to be recovering.

Traffic patterns and increasing attacks

Concurrent with these changes in traffic patterns, there was dramatic rise in DDoS and other attacks across virtually every metric measured, including increases in the overall number of attacks; attack severity, which considers the volume of attack and attack intensity

“It’s no surprise that in this massive and unplanned shift of the global workforce now suddenly being reliant on home internet and corporate VPN connectivity, bad actors and cyber criminals would seek to take advantage of emerging network vulnerabilities,” .

The DNS hijacking threat

While many DDoS and other types of attacks focus on corporate assets, there has also been an increase in DNS hijacking a technique in which DNS settings are changed to redirect the user to a website that might look legitimate but often contains malware disguised as something useful.

Combined with the growing number of threats against the internet’s DNS infrastructure, the unexpected need to support a fully distributed workforce often exposes new vulnerabilities that are difficult for organizations to guard against, underscoring the importance of having effective cybersecurity measures like always-on DDoS protection services in place to ensure operational continuity.