First trend: IoT botnets
The use of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become increasingly popular over the last few years. However, only a few organizations pay attention to the security of these devices. Adversaries are exploiting these security issues by infiltrating them with malicious software. By combining the power of all these infected IoT devices in a Botnet, adversaries can launch powerful and sophisticated DDoS attacks. For instance, the Mirai botnet had at its peak 600.000 infected devices under control, devices infected by Mirai scan and identify other vulnerable IoT devices on the internet. By using the factory default usernames and passwords, new devices are infected. The sheer number of infected devices resulted in huge attack bandwidth.
We predict IoT botnets will continue to grow, their distributed nature will make them harder to take down. Also, machine learning and data analytics can make them more efficient and self-sustainable in the future. Luckily there are multiple defense solutions, such as Akamai’s Kona Site Defender. By filtering packets at the edge of the network, these huge bandwidth attacks can be prevented. Last February, GitHub survived the biggest DDoS attack ever recorded, the attack peaked at a bandwidth of 1,3 Tbps. Using the DDoS protection of our partner Akamai, they were able to shut down this attack in just 8 seconds.