18 OPINION // A10 NETWORKS
Defending against DDoS attacks in the light of COVID-19 and 5G
C
Amr Alashaal, Regional Vice President – Middle East at A10 Networks
ybercriminals had a busy year in 2020, with rapidly increasing numbers of distributed denial of service (DDoS) weapons, widespread botnet activity, and some of
the largest DDoS attacks ever recorded. As COVID-19 drove an urgent shift online for everything from education and healthcare, to consumer shopping, to office work, hackers had more targets available than ever—many of them under protected due to the difficulty of maintaining security best practices in an
www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // MARCH 2021
emergency scenario. At the same time, the ongoing rollout of 5G technologies has accelerated the proliferation of IoT and smart devices around the world, making unsuspecting new recruits available for botnet armies to launch crushing attacks on a massive scale. In our ongoing tracking of DDoS attacks, DDoS attack methods, and malware activity, A10 Networks has observed a steady increase in the frequency, intensity, and sophistication of these threats, most recently in our State of DDoS Weapons Report for H2 2020, which covers the second half of the past year. During this period, we saw an increase of over 12 percent in the number of potential DDoS weapons available on the internet, with a total of approximately 12.5 million weapons detected. The good news is that proven methods of protection continue to be effective even as threat levels rise. In this article, we’ll talk about recent trends in DDoS activity and how to defend your organisation against this common and highly damaging type of attack. Botnets drive DDoS attack levels to new heights While organisations of all sizes fell victim to DDoS last year, two of the world’s largest companies made headlines for suffering unprecedented attacks. In June 2020, Amazon
