In 2019, 7% of recidivists1 were responsible for 78% of DDoS attacks. Obviously, recidivists are too menacing to overlook. Several groups of DDoS recidivists often work together to initiate attacks. Such groups are collectively referred to as an “IP gang”. In 2019, a total of 60 DDoS gangs were detected, including 15 ones that contained more than 1000 attack sources. The largest gang, formidably, consisted of 88,000 attack sources. On average, 35,000 attack sources remained active every month. Therefore, we should keep vigilant on gang behavior and attack gangs. In this section, we will profile and analyze major attack gangs.

In 2019, most frequently seen attacks were UDP floods, SYN floods, and ACK floods, which together accounted for 82% of all DDoS attacks. By contrast, reflection attacks took up only 10%. Compared with 2018, reflection attacks rose slightly in number, but remained small in proportion.

Key Findings:

Maturity: The technical maturity of attackers keeps growing, opening more possibilities than DDoS attacks for attackers to garner profits.

Combination: Of all DDoS attacks in 2019, 12.5% employed multiple vectors. This percentage was even higher among super-sized attacks (> 300 Gbps) to reach more than one-third. These factors have posed a greater challenge to the performance of cleaning devices, the stability of cleaning lines, and the effectiveness of defense operations.

Recidivists: In 2019, a total of 1.3 million DDoS recidivists (involved in more than 20 attacks) were spotted, 7% of whom were responsible for 78% of attacks. Recidivist behavior deserves continuous attention.

Gangs: In 2019, a total of 60 DDoS gangs were detected, including 15 ones that contained more than 1000 attack sources. The largest gang, formidably, consisted of 88,000 attack sources. On average, 35,000 attack sources remained active every month. Therefore, we should keep vigilant on gang behavior and attack groups.

Web Attack Trend

Websites, which enterprises or individuals use to provide services for users, are usually the first choice of hackers during attacks. Web attacks in 2019 clung to traditional patterns and methods, including server information disclosure, resource leeching, cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), SQL injection, and cookie poisoning, which together accounted for 89% of web attacks. Given their high popularity, these traditional methods will continue to be a top concern for defenders.

Key Findings [Vulnerabilities] 2019 saw a steady increase in high-risk vulnerabilities and in Internet of Things (IoT) vulnerability exploits. Of server-related vulnerabilities, web vulnerabilities stole the spotlight and the Windows remote desktop vulnerability CVE-2019-0708 had a far-reaching impact. [Malware] Ransomware and cryptojacking malware were two most active types of malware in 2019. In this year, […]

Executive Summary

2019 witnessed more intense challenges in global political and economic orders. Restricted by various conventions, agreements, and protocols, traditional military means are now the last resort. In this context, attacks on the financial sector and on the cyberspace become the first choices for rival countries to try on their modern military strategies. Predictably, these attacks will probably become regular approaches in the future. By the time when the 2018 Cybersecurity Insights was released, the following trends had taken shape regarding cybersecurity: The window between the discovery of a vulnerability and the effective exploitation of this vulnerability was shortened; the DDoS attack size steadily grew; emerging threats like those from the Internet of Things (IoT) rose sharply; such malware as backdoors, cryptojackers, worms, trojans, and botnets were still active. When it comes to information disclosure, the AcFun website was hacked, leading to a leak of nearly 10 million pieces of user data; India’s Aadhaar (India’s national ID database) number leak affected 1.1 billion citizens. Information disclosure events have hit record highs for six years in a row since 2013. The four enterprises, namely Facebook, Equifax, British Airways, and Marriott International, together were fined approximately USD 9 billion for privacy and information leaks, more than the aggregate market value of the cybersecurity industry in China in that year.

Analysis of IoT Attack Sources

From NSFOCUS’s IoT threat intelligence, we can associate DDoS attack events with IoT devices. Further analysis of IoT devices compared to source IP addresses of DDoS attacks found that 3.14% of DDoS attackers are IoT devices. Though this proportion is relatively small, the number of DDoS source IP addresses is so staggering large that DDoS attacks based on IoT devices is a very significant threat. (more…)

6.3 Worm In the 2018 H1 Cybersecurity Insights , we pointed out that most worm viruses were discovered more than five years ago. This indicates how capable these viruses are of propagating and evolving and how difficult it is to remove them completely from the network. According to data throughout the year, this was still […]

Backdoor, cryptominer, worm, trojan, and zombie115 made the list of active most malware in 2018. Strains of backdoors malware are still extremely active because they are too stealthy to be easily detected. As the virtual currency market continues to shrink, cryptomining is less popular than before, but still very active, coming second behind backdoors.

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5.3.2 Attack Type Distribution

In 2018, the most frequent attacks seen814 were SYN flood, UDP flood, ACK flood, HTTP flood and HTTPS flood attacks, which altogether accounted for 96% of all DDoS attacks. In contrast, reflection attackers contributed to no more than 3% of attacks. Compared with 2017, the year 2018 witnessed a 80% decrease in the number of reflection attacks, but a 73% increase in other attacks. This is because of effective governance measures taken against reflectors. (more…)