India Among Top 10 Sources for DDoS Attacks in Q2 2015: Akamai

As our economy becomes increasingly reliant on the Internet, it is now more important than ever to make sure the correct defences are in place. Security attacks in general - DDoS attacks in particular - are growing at a rapid pace globally and evolving to become more sophisticated, screams the latest State of the Internet - Security report from Akamai for Q2 2015.

India was one of the top target countries for Web Application Attacks in Q2 2015. Of all the attacks, 1 percent were targeted at India, the report said. With 81 percent of the market grab, the US remains to be the favourite spot for hackers.

Interestingly, not only was India among the most targeted nations, it was also the source of several such attacks. The country was among the top 10 sources for the DDoS attacks. Of all the attacks, 7.43 percent originated from the country. With 37.01 percent of all share, China remains the largest source for the same.

In the past quarter, the number of DDoS attacks, a security attack in which the server of a service is flooded with bogus traffic to take them down, increased by 7 percent compared to Q1 2015, and were up 132 percent compared to the Q2 2014. Average peak attack and volume, Akamai reported, also saw an upward spike, though they significantly dropped compared to Q2 2014.

More alarmingly, these attacks are happening at large scale. Akamai noted that in the past three quarters, the number of DDoS attacks has doubled. During this period, we saw 12 DDoS attacks that clocked at more than a whopping 100 Gigabits per seconds. The strongest attack peaked at 240 gigabits per second and persisted for more than 13 hours. Similarly, five attacks clocked at 50 million packets per second, something which only a handful of companies have the power to stand against.

The report from one of the biggest content distribution networks also revealed that attackers have become more aggressive at exploiting the limitations in old generation protocols. Older protocols such as RIPv1, CHARGEN, and NTP were among the most exploited.