As we wrap up another calendar year, we can’t help but think about the near future and what it holds in store for the cyber security – and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) as a growing issue. Based on Corero’s visibility into environments dealing with DDoS, we’ve summarized a few of the biggest trends we see on the horizon for 2018.
DDoS Cripples Cryptocurrency Exchanges
DDoS attacks against cryptocurrency have been a fairly common occurrence as of late, crippling the exchanges. This is the second attack against Bitfinex this month. With the growing popularity of digital currencies, the number of those attacks is likely to increase in the future. DDoS attacks against any digital currency could be utilized to manipulate the exchange market or the targeted currency. They can prevent traders from logging into accounts and making transactions, causing the value to drop. Attackers can then pause the attack efforts to buy as much as they can while the price is low – impacting the overall value of the currency. Just recently, in mid-December, DDoS attacks on cryptocurrency companies affected trading volume and price. Whether or not the Bitcoin fever will turn into a big burst bubble, we expect cryptocurrency exchanges to suffer many forms of cyberattack, from ransomware to DDoS attacks, or some combination of both (RDoS).
IoT Security Troubles Rising
The Internet of Things (IoT) is developing rapidly; Statista.com predicts that in 2018 there will be 23.14 billion IoT devices, compared with 20.35 billion in 2017. As the number of connected devices grows, so do the threats that come with it, making this another major concern in cyber security predictions for 2018. The availability of Internet connected devices with vulnerable operating systems are paving the way for massive botnet activity, which is further driven by the proliferation of DDoS- for-hire services.
These “zombie armies” of connected devices can then be leveraged in both large scale and everyday DDoS attack activity. As we know too well, a DDoS attack is easy to launch as it does not require in-depth understanding of programing or networking. The largest DDoS attack to-date was a record 1.2 Tbps, in late 2016 against Domain Name Service provider, Dyn. Investigation into this attack showed that a large number of IoT devices were hijacked as botnets to carry out the attack. It’s becoming harder to ignore the security risks associated with IoT, which is why this concern will continue to dominate into 2018.
