News

According to a new report from Lumen, the telecom industry experienced more distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks than four other industries combined during the second quarter. The report revealed that nearly three quarters (74%) of the attacks targeted telecom customers.

Following telecom, the verticals that experienced DDoS attacks were government (9%), gaming (5%), hosting (4%), and software and technology (3%). Lumen noted that 44% of the attacks observed during the quarter were multi-vector attacks, which involved the combination of multiple techniques.

The report was part of an update on the performance of Lumen’s DDoS Mitigation and Application Protection Services, which were introduced during the quarter. Peter Brecl, Lumen’s director of product management for DDoS mitigation and application protection, emphasized the importance for businesses to have highly available, dynamic, high-performing, and secure applications in response to the evolving tactics used by attackers.

The report also highlighted that attackers are continuously changing the number and types of vector combinations they employ, making these attacks significantly more complex than single vector attacks. Lumen recommended the implementation of safeguards to protect against attacks that utilize application programming interfaces (APIs), as their usage continues to rise.

Additional findings from the report revealed that the average size of attacks mitigated by Lumen during the first quarter of 2023 was 1.9 Gbps, marking a 6% increase from the previous quarter and the highest average in the past year. Furthermore, the average packet-rate based attack scrubbed during the quarter was 838 Kpps (kilo packets per second), reflecting a 137% increase from the previous quarter and the largest average in the past year.

Lumen mitigated a total of 5,472 DDoS attacks in the second quarter, indicating a 20% year-over-year increase and an average of 63 attacks per day. Additionally, 63% of the DDoS attacks had attack periods of less than 10 minutes, representing a 23% year-over-year increase.

In October 2020, Lumen announced significant upgrades to its DDoS Mitigation Service.

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