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During the pandemic , Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) attacks have risen in frequency and adapted to take advantage of a rise in home working , leading to costly downtime and revenue loss . Ashley Stephenson , CTO for Corero Network , examines the current situation and how to fight back .

LTHOUGH DISTRIBUTED

DENIAL OF SERVICE ( DDoS ) attacks have been around for over 20 years , the concept has evolved in that time and it ’ s worth defining the problem space . A DDoS attack occurs when multiple systems are used to overwhelm the available bandwidth or resources of a network , application , service , or other targeted system . This overloading can cause the victim to offer a severely degraded service , or even fail completely .

While traditional DDoS focused on high volumes of bits per second to flood the network , today ’ s attacks use new , more sophisticated techniques , often employing multiple attack vectors at the same time to evade legacy DDoS protection . Such attacks can result in costly downtime , lost revenue and reputation damage to organisations that rely on the Internet to do business .

Multi-vector threat

DDoS attack tactics are incredibly varied . These include massive strikes such as the

2016 assault against Domain Name Service Provider Dyn that shut down around a dozen major Internet platforms and services including Twitter , Spotify , Basecamp , Comcast , Reddit , Netflix and others that were made unavailable to millions of users in Europe and North America .

Other variants include DDoS attacks used to extract a ransom . In 2017 , a UK citizen was arrested for targeting Lloyds and Barclays banks with a Mirai-powered DDoS extortion campaign . In April 2020 , another UK suspect was linked with an alleged attack on seven UK banking organisations . In this case , the service used to launch the alleged attacks , WebStresser , was also successfully taken down , with its servers seized and seven individuals across Europe and North America , who were suspected of operating the service , were arrested .

However , the more insidious DDoS events are smaller attacks that do not steal as much bandwidth on their own but generate an impact due to the increased frequency or entropy of the DDoS packets hitting the

IT IS CRITICAL TO IMPLEMENT A SYSTEM THAT ACCURATELY MONITORS NETWORK TRAFFIC FOR BOTH SMALL- SCALE AND HIGH-VOLUME ATTACKS .