A new report examining distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in the first half of 2014 has shown that incidents are increasing exponentially at 20Gbps.
Released by Arbor Networks, the report also showed how so far this year, there have been more than 100 major DDos events that flooded systems with the equivalent of 100Gbps, according to ZDNet.
Using their ATLAS system, the researchers were also able to determine that the single largest attack targeted a Spanish company with a flood of data measured at 154.69Gbps.
Given their size and importance on the world stage, the three arguably biggest users of the internet also contributed to the most common sources of DDoS attacks in the second quarter of 2014: South Korea emerged as the worst offender, contributing 15.1pc of all attacks, and the US was the origin of 14.8pc such attacks, up 3.8pc since the first quarter this year.
The key figures from the Arbor report
With almost half the amount of South Korea and the US, China totalled 6.7pc of all attacks, up from 2.8pc only a few months previously.
Arbor Networks’ director of solutions Darren Anstee said the biggest worry now for companies and organisations is the frequency with which these attacks are occurring.
“The frequency of very large attacks continues to be an issue, and organisations should take an integrated, multi-layered approach to protection. Even organisations with significant amounts of internet connectivity can now see that capacity exhausted relatively easily by the attacks that are going on out there.”