Recent Spate of Activity Shows DDoS Extortion Not ‘Old News’: Akamai

Bad actors are picking up the pace and raising the bar on cyberthreats, blogged Tom Emmons, Akamai principal product architect, about the fast-rising rate of “volumetric” distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks this year. “We've already seen more attacks over 50 Gbps” through March 24 than in all 2019, Emmons said Wednesday. “DDoS attacks are getting bolder and badder. Three of the six biggest volumetric DDoS attacks Akamai has ever recorded and mitigated have been in the past month, including the two largest known DDoS extortion attacks to date.” Threat actors “continue to expand their sights,” said Emmons. “The number of customer attacks per month has continued at near record volume, and we have continued to see diversification of attacks across geographies and industries.” Criminals apparently cling to "hope of a major Bitcoin payout,” he said. Bad actors “have started to ramp up their efforts and their attack bandwidth, which puts to rest any notion that DDoS extortion was old news.”