From: InfoSec News (alertsinfosecnews.org)
Date: Thu Apr 18 2013 - 04:15:56 CDT

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http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/fueled-by-super-botnets-ddos-attacks-grow-meaner-and-ever-more-powerful/

By Dan Goodin
Ars Technica
Apr 17 2013

Coordinated attacks used to knock websites offline grew meaner and more
powerful in the past three months, with an eight-fold increase in the average
amount of junk traffic used to take sites down, according to a company that
helps customers weather the so-called distributed denial-of-service campaigns.

The average amount of bandwidth used in DDoS attacks mushroomed to an
astounding 48.25 gigabits per second in the first quarter, with peaks as high
as 130 Gbps, according to Hollywood, Florida-based Prolexic. During the same
period last year, bandwidth in the average attack was 6.1 Gbps and in the
fourth quarter of last year it was 5.9 Gbps. The average duration of attacks
also grew to 34.5 hours, compared with 28.5 hours last year and 32.2 hours
during the fourth quarter of 2012. Earlier this month, Prolexic engineers saw
an attack that exceeded 160 Gbps, and officials said they wouldn't be surprised
if peaks break the 200 Gbps threshold by the end of June.

The spikes are brought on by new attack techniques that Ars first chronicled in
October. Rather than using compromised PCs in homes and small offices to flood
websites with torrents of traffic, attackers are relying on Web servers, which
often have orders of magnitude more bandwidth at their disposal. As Ars
reported last week, an ongoing attack on servers running the WordPress blogging
application is actively seeking new recruits that can also be harnessed to form
never-before-seen botnets to bring still more firepower.

Also fueling the large-scale assaults are well-financed attackers who are
increasingly able to coordinate with fellow crime organizations, Prolexic
officials wrote in quarterly global DDoS report published Wednesday.

[...]

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