DDoS Attacks in Q3 2018

[harlan4096]

Contents

• News Overview
  
• Quarter Trends
  
• Statistics
  
• Methodology
  
• Quarter summary
  
• Attacks geography
  
• Dynamics of the number of DDoS attacks
  
• Duration and types of DDoS attacks
  
• Botnet distribution geography
  
• Conclusion
  

News Overview

The third quarter 2018 turned out relatively quiet in terms of DDoS attacks. “Relatively” because there were not very many high-level multi-day DDoS onslaughts on major resources. However, the capacities employed by cybercriminals keep growing year after year, while the total number of attacks shows no signs of decline.

The early July attack on Blizzard Entertainment has made some of this summer’s top headlines. Battle.net servers were sent offline, preventing players from logging in and launching their games for almost three days. The responsibility was claimed by a group called PoodleCorp, which made an appearance on Twitter promising to leave the company alone if their message were retweeted 2,000 times or more. Soon after their condition was satisfied, Blizzard reported “having fixed the technical issues earlier experienced by players.”

Towards the end of July there followed a series of attacks on another game publisher – Ubisoft. As a result, players were having trouble logging on to their accounts and using the multiplayer mode. According to the company spokesmen, user data was not compromised. There were no reports as to the purpose of the action. The attackers might have had financial gains in mind or just protested against some of the recent updates made to the games.

One more attack deserving the epithet of ‘major’ was, for several days, plaguing the three largest poker websites in the English-speaking segment: America’s Card… Room, PokerStars and Partypoker. The victimized operators were forced to cancel some of their events, sparking resentment on the part of players, who thus lost major sums of money.

As always, there were also DDoS attacks almost certainly resulting from political tension. The six-minute long disruption of the Swedish Social Democratic Party’s website at the end of August has been a stark example of such an attack. Likewise, politics is believed to have driven a similar attack on the website of a Democratic congressional candidate in California, which followed a month later. The tag of ‘political’ is also likely deserved by the activism-inspired (or rather environmental) motives which had fuelled the attack on the German RWE: by hitting their website the activists were trying to draw public attention to the impending clearing of the Hambach forest.

Full reading: https://securelist.com/ddos-report-in-q3-2018/88617/