Vietnam, Indonesia and India will become major sources of DDoS attacks in 2015 thanks to the sheer volume of compromised endpoints such as mobile phones, according to cyber security firm Black Lotus.
The DDoS mitigation firm’s Q3 2014 Threat Report outlines the latest techniques cybercriminals are using in an attempt to outwit the security industry.
Of the new threat from Asia, it explained:
“While these countries don’t have the large bandwidth necessary to launch massive volumetric DDoS attacks, the large number of compromised end point devices, particularly smart mobile phones, make these countries prime sources of newly created botnets.”
The warnings echo findings from Akamai last year.
The security firm claimed in its Q2 State of the Internet report that Indonesia became the world’s biggest source of attack traffic – accounting for 38%.
However, that figure dropped in subsequent quarters, presumably as users in the country cleaned up endpoints.
Elsewhere, for Q3 this year Black Lotus claimed that China topped attack sources by country, followed by the US then Russia, although it didn’t say by how much. This is at odds with Akamai’s Q3 2014 report which put the US in top spot (24%), followed by China (20%) and then Brazil (18%).
The majority of DDoS attacks spotted in the quarter (58%) were rated “severe." Nearly half were SYN floods and 15% were aimed at web servers and DNS.
“DDoS attacks continue to fall in size and frequency in 2014, making them easier to handle for tier one carrier networks with excess capacity, but still tricky to manage for organizations with less bandwidth,” said co-founder, Shawn Marck, in a statement.
“The widespread education of ways to thwart NTP caused attackers to resort to tried and true blends of SYN flood and application layer attacks, which are very difficult to mitigate using conventional network hardware as these types target the same port needed to serve legitimate users.”