Akamai Finds DDoS Attacks Up 71 Percent in Q3

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks increased 71 percent year-over-year in Q3, Akamai reported Tuesday. DDoS attacks greater than 100 Mbps increased 138 percent, including two attacks attributed to the Mirai botnet. Mirai originated the October attacks against DynDNS, which caused outages and latency for major U.S. websites (see 1610210056). The DynDNS attacks have resulted in significant congressional interest in the cybersecurity of connected devices (see 1610260067). The House Communications and Commerce Trade subcommittees are set to hold a hearing Wednesday on IoT cybersecurity, partially in response to the DynDNS attacks (see 1611090063). In contrast, Akamai found that web application attacks decreased 18 percent, with U.S.-originating attacks down 67 percent.