Preceding 2020 turned out to be the most favorable year for the development of online business. The reason behind that is the current situation in the world: it has become much safer and more convenient to buy things and even work through the Internet. Back then, when everyone was just beginning to adapt to the new way of life, cybercriminals teamed up and carried out a large number of cyberattacks. Their consequences did not go unnoticed
What is a DDoS attack?
Such a maleficent intrusion is aimed to stop the operation of the Internet resource. This is achieved by sending hundreds of thousands of requests from different addresses per second. Thus, the main server will be overloaded and crash.
Compared to the end of 2019, in the first three months of 2020, the number of DDoS attacks increased by more than 500 percent. And this figure doubled in the following month.
The number of small-scale attacks keeps increasing, and the large-scale ones are more challenging to get over. This information was published by such experts as Vivek Ganti and Omer Yoachimik. Furthermore, according to them, it was in 2020 that the intrusions observed were the most powerful in history. The range of each attack varied from 30 to 60 minutes. Although cyber failure may seem of short duration, it can bring great financial and information losses.
Cloudflare and Akamai were hit by a major cyberattack
Cloudflare, a company providing security services against such attacks, was exposed to a similar hack. Cybercriminals mobilized on June 18 and kept attacking the server for four whole days. Cloudflare representatives officially stated that the criminals tried to reboot the routers, but they failed. According to some experts, this was a maneuver before larger-scale attacks.
Akamai, another company providing Internet security services, was hit by an intensive attack of a packet per second type on June 21. That criminal activity targeted a European bank. Such a DDoS attack exhausts all hardware resources and disables them.
Interestingly, the growth in the number of IP addresses from which requests were received was very dangerous – the attack intensity grew from a normal traffic level to 418 Gbps in no time. And the highest rate of 809 million packets per second was noticed two minutes from the beginning. In addition to these companies, criminal activities also targeted such a trading platform as Amazon.