A new report from the cybersecurity firm Netscout states that DDoS attacks have become more common and complex. The report, which looks into the effects of remote working on overall cybersecurity in the UK, said that cybercriminals have continued to innovate in their efforts.
The criminals are now making new variants of Mirai. In May alone, the Netscout researchers logged more than 929,000 attacks. Mirai is a botnet that hijacks IoT devices and uses the bandwidth to carry out large-scale DDoS attacks. The most common botnets out there are variants of Mirai.
Mirai and others
Netscout has also seen some non-Mirai malware samples that attack IoT. One of them is Gafgyt, a multi-architecture bot that has several similarities to Mirai. It uses telnet with default/factory credentials to spread to unsecured IoT devices. Just like Mirai, Gafgyt supports several TCP, UDP, and HTTP-based DDoS attacks.
The report adds that whoever created Gafgyt is still active and is continuously updating and developing the botnet in question. The researchers say that they saw a significant increase in Gafgyt samples from February all through to June.
A dramatic year in terms of attacks
Just last month, in another report, Netscout also reported that researchers had recorded, through the company’s visibility, 4.83 million DDoS attacks in the first half of 2020. On average, that would mean that there were almost 30,000 recorded attacks a day.
Netscout’s previous threat report indicated a 15% rise in DDoS attacks in the first six months of this year and 25% for overall threats.
As the attacks get more complex than ever, IoT devices aren’t making it easy to monitor or even stop the threats from getting through and wreaking havoc. The hope most people have is to secure their networks.
Also read: Cybercrime becomes more sophisticated: ‘we can’t continue like this.’
21 hours ago
