This week, the Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report was released, wherein it stated that in 2014, the number of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks rose by more than 50 percent, Arbor Networks reported.
Aside from the size of the DDoS attacks, the report also noted that the new attacks are far more complicated and they happening more often than before. When the Arbor Network issued its first report in 2004, a cyber attack that cost the loss of data of around 8 Gigabits per second (Gbps) is already considered as a large scale attack. In 2014, ten years later, a cyber attack can cost as much as 400 Gbps in data loss.
A lot of DDoS attackers, as reported by SMN Weekly, uses brute force method, in order to shutdown a particular web site or network. Brute force works by sending a very large amount of service requests, in which, servers will not be able to keep up with flood of data which in turn causes them to shutdown.
Recently, Facebook and Instagram suffered an outage in which a hacker group called Lizard Squad immediately claimed responsibility; however, a Facebook spokesperson admitted that the outage was a result of an internal technical glitch and not as a result of an external hacking attack.
Lizard Squad is a hacking group that has made a name for itself. They also claimed that the disruption on Sony's PlayStation Network and Microsoft's X-box Live Network were their doing. Lizard Squad can be described as a group of young people out to create some online pranks.
Arbor Network did note that not all cyber attacks are made by bored young people. A number of these DDoS attacks seem to be for the purpose of sending a political message or statement. The availability of DDoS hacking tools has also enabled even those with limited technical skills to launch a cyber attack on their own.