It takes about ten minutes to prepare for a DDOS attack. Ten minutes, two search terms, fill in your credit card details, select a few checkmarks and you are a push of a button away from your own distributed denial of service attack on a website, server or web service. It is not certain whether your ddos will be successful, but it is in any case very easy to use disruptive attacks. Literally, because a large part of the ddos attacks are carried out by script kiddies and young people who cannot stand their loss. The DDOS attacks on banks, the tax authorities and Tweakers in 2018 were also carried out by an eighteen-year-old boy. Despite this, many people speculated that it was the Russians.
Ddos attacks are getting bigger and more extensive, report op report. In 2019, the National Management Organization for Internet Providers or NBIP detected 919 ddos attacks on Dutch companies and government institutions. Although there were slightly less than a year before, the attacks were larger-scale and more complex.
‘Complex’ is a difficult concept in a denial-of-service attack, because although ddos are difficult to detect and stop, the principle of an attack is simple. A server or website is bombarded with traffic until there is an overload, making the service unusable. When the NBIP calls ddos attacks ‘more complex’, it mainly means that different attack methods are used, but in essence the effect and the solution remain the same. There is a lot of traffic and it must be diverted to a place where it does not bother you. This is of course much simpler said than done.
Growth
As is often the case in the security sector, the magnitude of the problem surrounding DDOS attacks is difficult to estimate. Different research institutes and companies have different measuring methods and the studies of companies such as Cloudflare have a considerable ‘us-from-WC-Duck content’. But that there is growth is certain.
This growth is not so much in the number of attacks, but mainly in their size and scope. For example, the NBIP recently came up with a report showing that the attacks are becoming more complex. Many other security companies conclude something similar. NexusGuard speaks of ‘five hundred percent growth in size in 2018‘, Cloudflare of’one and a half times bigger attacks‘and Ddos protector Neustar van’growth on almost every metric since the coronavirus outbreak‘. The picture may be clear, but how can such a simplistic phenomenon develop into such a global problem?
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