Akamai State of the Internet / Security Summer 2018: Web Attack Report Shows Hospitality Industry Under Siege From Botnets
Hospitality Industry vs. Bots: Analysis of Fraud Attempts
The use of bots to abuse stolen credentials continues to be a major risk for Internet-driven businesses, but data from this report reveals that the hospitality industry experiences many more credential abuse attacks than other sectors.
Geographic analysis of attack traffic origination reveals that
"These countries have historically been large centers for cyberattacks, but the attractiveness of the hospitality industry appears to have made it a significant target for hackers to carry out bot-driven fraud," said
The Rise of Advanced DDoS Attacks Highlights Need for Security Adaptability
While simple volumetric DDoS attacks continued to be the most common method used to attack organizations globally, other techniques have continued to appear. For this edition of the report,
One of the attacks in the report came from a group that coordinated their attacks over group chats on STEAM and IRC. Rather than using a botnet of devices infected with malware to follow hacker commands, these attacks were carried out by a group of human volunteers. Another notable attack overwhelmed the target's DNS server with bursts lasting several minutes instead of using a sustained attack against the target directly. This added to the difficulty of mitigating the attack due to the sensitivity of DNS servers, which allows outside computers to find them on the Internet. The burst system also increased difficulty by fatiguing the defenders over a long period of time.
"Both of these attack types illustrate how attackers are always adapting to new defenses to carry out their nefarious activities," said McKeay. "These attacks, coupled with the record-breaking 1.35 Tbps memcached attacks from earlier this year, should serve as a not-so-gentle reminder that the security community can never grow complacent."
By the Numbers:
Other highlights from
Akamai measured a 16 percent increase in the number of DDoS attacks recorded since last year.- The largest DDoS attack of the year set a new record at 1.35 Tbps by using the memcached reflector attack.
- Researchers identified a 4 percent increase in reflection-based DDoS attacks since last year.
- There was a 38 percent increase in application-layer attacks such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting.
- In April, the Dutch National High Tech Crime Unit took down a malicious DDoS-for-hire website with 136,000 users.
A complimentary copy of the Summer 2018 State of the Internet / Security: Web Attack report is available for download at akamai.com/stateoftheinternet-security. For further analysis from the
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