Spam decreasing, DDoS attack on the rise

Although the quantity of spam is decreasing (lowest level since March 2009) DDoS attacks are on the rise.  This past year, the largest single attack was over 100 gigabits per second, and the trend shows an increase year after year.

Arbor Networks has released a report that identifies the targets and detection/mitigation tools used by corporations world wide.  Simple packet flooding attacks are giving way to increasingly sophisticated application-layer attacks (HTTP, DNS and SMTP).

Mitigation/defense tools most commonly in use are ACLs, “Intellegent DdoS mitigations systems” (commercial software) and RTBH (remotely triggered black holing) tools.

An odd note is that nearly 75% of the responders to the survey identified some attacks as coming from inside their own networks (Outbound and Crossbound attacks).