Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have become an ongoing threat for organisations. Using a variety of techniques, a wide range of threat actors from lone hackers, criminal gangs and hacktivists to nation-states are using DDoS attacks to disrupt or disable the performance of target systems.

During Q2 2022, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks reached a new high as the proportion of smart attacks and average duration increased dramatically. The average duration of a DDoS attack increased 100 times over the previous year, reaching 3,000 minutes. Smart attacks nearly broke the four-year record, accounting for nearly half of all attacks.

Darren Anstee, chief technology officer for security at NETSCOUT stated, “Omnis AIF, which incorporates the new DDoS reputation feed, takes an intelligence-based approach providing customers with faster, more comprehensive, and more automated solutions.”

Ransomware groups have recently added a variety of other extortion techniques to their arsenal, such as launching DDoS attacks and contacting victims’ customers, making it even more difficult for defenders.

It’s also worth noting that this attack occurred over HTTPS. HTTPS DDoS attacks require more computational resources due to the higher cost of establishing a secure TLS encrypted connection.