It seems like cyber criminals have taken the challenge to surpass their counterparts and attack with greater intensity than their previous endeavors. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is their favorite weapon while countries like China, UK, Italy, Hong Kong, US, South Korea and Russia are their favored targets.
The latest DDoS attack that was launched against a Chinese Telecom firm is considered unprecedented and record-breaking because it lasted for 11 days, approx. 227 hours. This means extended attacks are the new preference of cyber criminals.
The attack lasted 277 hours (more than 11 days)More: New Mirai variant launched a 54-hour DDoS attack on a US college
According to Kaspersky Lab researchers, the attack was launched in the second quarter of 2017 and records a 131% increase from the previous quarter. They also noted that in this quarter a new trend had been identified where hackers extort money from organizations through DDoS attacks. In their blog post, a Kaspersky Lab’s researcher wrote:
“Cybercriminals send a message to a victim company demanding a ransom of 5 to 200 bitcoins. Such messages are often accompanied by short-term attacks which serve as a demonstration of the attacker’s power. In most cases, they do not launch a demonstrative attack. Paying the ransom would create a certain reputation for a company and provoke further attacks on other cyber criminal groups.”
These attacks, however, aren’t always launched by professional teams of hackers but are being increasingly carried out by beginners who don’t even have the expertise to launch a DDoS attack. Such teams only concentrate upon launching demonstrative attacks in order to make some easy cash.
Usually, wrote the researcher, “companies that for one reason or another have no resources to organize security for their services yet capable of parting with available funds to pay the ransom” are the primary victims of such schemes.
As per the DDoS Intelligence Report 2017, the Chinese telecom attack is the longest recorded DDoS attack of the year. Kaspersky Lab’s malware and anti-botnet analyst Oleg Kupreev said that there is no single, definite explanation for this whopping increment in the length of this attack because cyber criminals play with the lengths occasionally.
