The impact of cybersecurity attacks on businesses is significant and unleashes the potential to cause theft or destruction of business critical data, loss of revenue and irreparable damage to reputation. It would be of interest to note that Akamai’s State of the Internet — Security report for Q4 2016, revealed that India is 2nd in the list of countries in Asia Pacific that sourced the most web application attack traffic with nearly 86,38,666 attacks attributed as originating from the country, after China. While this is a significant number, India also ranks 4th in the list of target countries for Web Application Attacks, globally.
Akamai Technologies, Inc., a global leader in content delivery network (CDN) services, released its Fourth Quarter, 2016 State of the Internet / Security Report last week. The report, using data gathered from the Akamai Intelligent Platform, provides analysis of the current cloud security and threat landscape, as well as insight into seasonal trends.
While India has actively embarked on the journey towards a digital economy, the user base of web applications is poised for a drastic increase. The report is a clear indication of the significant need for companies to scale up investments to ensure application and infrastructure security in the immediate future.
The other key global findings from the report include:
DDoS Attacks
• Attacks greater than 100 Gbps increased 140 per cent year-over-year from Q4 2015
• The largest DDoS attack in Q4 2016, which peaked at 517 Gbps, came from Spike, a non-IoT botnet that has been around for more than two years.
• Seven of the 12 Q4 2016 mega attacks, those with traffic greater than 100 Gbps, can be directly attributed to the Mirai botnet.
• The number of IP addresses involved in DDoS attacks grew significantly this quarter.
Web Application Attacks
• The United States remained the top source country for web application attacks, showing a 72 per cent increase from Q3 2016.
• SQLi, LFI, and XSS web application vectors accounted for 95 per cent of observed web application attacks in Q4 2016, similar to Q3 2016.
• The number of web application attacks in Q4 2016 was down 19 per cent from Q4 2015; however, research into retail traffic over the United States Thanksgiving holiday week revealed an upward trend for four sub-verticals (apparel and footwear, consumer portals, consumer electronics and media and entertainment) that all suffered from significant web application attacks.
Top Attack Vectors
• Of the 25 DDoS attack vectors tracked in Q4 2016, the top three were UDP fragment (27 per cent), DNS (21 per cent), and NTP (15 per cent), while overall DDoS attacks decreased by 16 per cent.
• Akamai added a new reflection DDoS attack vector this quarter, Connectionless Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP), which attackers abuse to amplify DDoS traffic.
With digital initiatives being aggressively pursued both, in the private and the public sector, opportunities will continue to grow but organizations need to ensure the right processes, tools and people are in place to combat data breaches, loss of revenue and reputation while protecting brand reputation.
