Verisign’s distributed denial of service trends report revealed that DDoS activity in Q4 2015 was the highest since Q1 2014.
The company said it mitigated 85 percent more attacks in Q4 2015 compared to previous year, and 15 percent more attacks compared to Q3 2015.
The fastest flood attack mitigated by Verisign occurred in Q4 2015, sending 125 million packets per second and driving a volumetric DDoS attack of 65 gigabits per second.
Verisign said average attack size observed by Verisign continues to be high at 6.88 Gbps, with nearly a third of attacks peaking over 5 Gbps.
The industry most frequently targeted by DDoS attacks was IT Services/Cloud/SaaS, representing 32 percent of mitigation activity in Q4 2015, closely followed by Media and Entertainment, representing 30 percent of all mitigations.2
The most common attacks Verisign mitigated were User Datagram Protocol (UDP) floods, including Network Time Protocol (NTP), Domain Name System (DNS), and Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) floods, which collectively accounted for approximately 75 percent of attacks in Q4 2015.
Some of the Internet’s DNS root name servers, including the A- and J-root servers operated by Verisign, were targets of DNS-based DDoS attacks, the report read.
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