Industry DDoS attacks plummet in Q1 following ‘carpet bomb Christmas’
Data from Continent 8 reveals attacks on the decline in first three months of the year in both size and duration
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the industry plummeted during Q1 2023, according to the latest data from Continent 8.
The first three months of the year saw just 184 DDoS attacks blocked by the firm, compared to a record-breaking 3,367 attacks in Q4 2022.
Gambling firms were subject to a ‘carpet bomb’ of DDoS attacks around Christmas, but that has now seemingly subsided in 2023.
Continent 8 noted most DDoS attacks happened during January, indicating a lingering after-effect of the level of attacks at the end of 2022.
In Q1, the longest sustained attack amounted to just five hours, down from 87 hours in Q4 2022.
The peak attack size hit 49.5gbps, down from 305.4gbps in the previous quarter.
The average customer was subject to two DDoS attacks during the quarter, with total customers facing attacks for a cumulative 464.4 hours.
In fact, during Q4, Continent 8 noted it ingested 10 petabytes of data into its network, five times the normal amount of two petabytes.
The supplier said that assuming it had ingested two petabytes of legitimate data, the remaining eight was DDoS traffic.
Craig Lusher, senior product specialist at Continent 8, said: “Thankfully, this was a much quieter quarter compared to the previous. The quarter adhered to a common trend with most attacks measuring under 10gbps, with the overall average attack size decreasing too.
“However, it is important to note that even low throughput attacks can include millions of packets per second, posing a threat to networking equipment rather than internet bandwidth alone.
“While we continue to see significant changes in attacks from quarter to quarter, DDoS attacks are a constant threat to any business,” he added.