"Carpet Bombing Attacks on the Rise"
Security researchers at Neustar Security Services have found that carpet bombing Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are on the rise. Carpet bombing, in which a DDoS attack targets multiple IP addresses of an organization within a very short time, accounted for 44% of total attacks last year. The researchers found that in the first two quarters of 2021, carpet bombing represented just over a third (34%) of total attacks mitigated by the SOC. However, this form of DDoS attack became more prevalent in the second half of the year, accounting for 60% of all attacks in Q3 and 56% in Q4. The researchers stated that the most intense carpet bombing attack was clocked at 369 million packets per second (Mpps). The researchers noted that while "the majority of attacks were over in minutes," the longest-running attack dragged on for nine days, 22 hours, and 42 minutes.