The second quarter of the year saw a 3-fold increase in distributed denial of service attacks since last year according to a report published by security firm Kaspersky. DDos attacks had spiked this year after the commencement of lockdowns across countries.
The pandemic induced work-from-home situation had seen an increase in targeted ransomware attacks and experts warn that the DDoS attacks could also be because of the same.”The number of attacks Kaspersky DDoS Protection detected and blocked in Q2 2020 is 217% higher than in the same period of 2019,” the company said in a press note. Cybercriminals find it easier to attacks home networks compared to secured office networks and are using this to their advantage. The first quarter of the year also saw the same number of DDoS attacks. Usually DDoS attacks peak during the first month of the year, when business is in full swing and lessen towards April but this year has been an exception. People are spending more time online and using online resources in lockdown which has been putting them at risk.
Educational and governmental institutions were reportedly targeted the most in the second quarter. The most affected regions are China (65.12%), the United States (20.28 %) and Hong Kong (6.08%). SYN flood remains the main DDoS attack tool (94.7 %), while ICMP attacks accounted for 4.9 %.
