Q4 2016 Global DDoS Threat Landscape Report

Imperva Incapsula’s latest quarterly Global DDoS Threat Landscape Report underscores the rapid evolution of DDoS capabilities over the past year.

As detailed in the report, DDoS attacks continue to escalate from quarter to quarter in size and persistence. This shift in the threat landscape is being driven by an emergence of powerful IoT botnets and the declining costs of DDoS-for-hire services.

Reflecting this evolution, these were some of the notable developments in Q4 2016:

• Network layer attacks hit record heights – In December, we faced a massive 650Gbps network layer assault – the largest ever mitigated by our service.
• Application layer attacks became more common – The number of attacks in Q4 reached an all-time high, with an average of 889 application layer assaults per week.
• Attack frequency scaled up – On average, 58.3 percent of websites were targeted more than once, with 13.1 percent being targeted more than ten times.
• China continued to be a hub of botnet activity – Some 78.5 percent of DDoS attacks worldwide originated from IPs in China.

Read the full report

Many of the developments we saw in Q4 2016 were connected to long-term shifts in the DDoS threat landscape.

The infographic below recaps the major trends of 2016, based on a compilation of attack data from all four quarters.

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