Over 20Gbps DDoS attacks have become common occurrences, Prolexic says

Last year such high-bandwidth attacks were isolated incidents, but attacks that exceed 20Gbps in bandwidth occur frequently now, Prolexic's president Stuart Scholly said Tuesday.

This is significant because very few companies or organizations have the necessary network infrastructure to deal with such attacks. There might be some companies with popular websites such as GoogleGoogle or FacebookFacebook that are able to handle such high-bandwidth floods, but most companies are not, Scholly said. Alles zu Facebook auf CIO.de Alles zu Google auf CIO.de

Prolexic plans to upgrade the capacity of its own cloud-based DDoS mitigation infrastructure in order to keep pace with the increasing volume of high-bandwidth attacks, he said.

The company released its global DDoS attack report for the third quarter of 2012 on Wednesday. According to report, there's been an 88 percent increase in the overall number of attacks compared to the same period of last year. However, compared to the second quarter of 2012, the number of attacks actually declined by 14 percent.

The average attack bandwidth during the third quarter of 2012 was 4.9Gbps, which represents a 230 percent increase compared to a year earlier, and an 11 percent increase compared to the previous quarter.