Distributed denial-of-service attacks increased in 2021 as attackers use more sophisticated tools and carry out more attacks.
Much of the attacks took place in the fourth quarter of 2021, most notably in December, with a third of Cloudflare customers also claiming to have received a ransom note from the attackers.
On an annual basis, Cloudflare said that most DDoS attacks took place in 2021, up 29% and 175% quarter-over-quarter increase.
Cloudflare analysis showed that application-layer DDoS attacks, particularly on HTTP DDoS, increased by 641% compared to the third quarter of 2021.
IP addresses showed that most DDoS attacks originated in China, the United States, Brazil and India. Cloudflare explained that SYN floods remain a popular method of attack for carrying out DDoS attacks.
“When we look at emerging attack vectors — which helps us understand what new vectors attackers are deploying to launch attacks — we observe a massive spike in SNMP, MSSQL, and generic UDP-based DDoS attacks,” Cloudflare explained.
Companies dealing with short-lived DDoS attacks are advised to turn to an automated mitigation solution. This acts on the spot and stops the assault on the spot.
For more information, read the original story in BleepingComputer.