Netscout
Vital Pandemic Industries Foster Unprecedented DDoS Attack Activity
Netscout today announced findings from its bi-annual Threat Intelligence Report, punctuated by a record-setting 10,089,687 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks observed during 2020. Cybercriminals exploited vulnerabilities exposed by massive internet usage shifts since many users were no longer protected by enterprise-grade security. Attackers paid particular attention to vital pandemic industries such as eCommerce, streaming services, online learning, and healthcare generating a 20% year-over-year increase in attack frequency over 2019 plus a 22% increase in the last six months of 2020. In August, a threat actor Netscout dubbed Lazarus Bear Armada (LBA) launched one of the most sustained and extensive DDoS extortion campaigns yet seen, taking down the New Zealand stock exchan...
NETSCOUT Visibility is Enhanced by AWS Expanded Support for Virtual Private Cloud Traffic Mirroring
Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at Networks Unlimited Africa Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest provider of on-demand cloud computing platforms, has now expanded its Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) Traffic Mirroring to support additional select non-Nitro Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types. As a result of this expansion, NETSCOUT is enabled to provide end-to-end visibility for security and service assurance of even more applications and services that are used in AWS. NETSCOUT, a leading global provider of service assurance, security and business analytics, is distributed throughout Africa by Networks Unlimited. Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at value-added distributor Networks Unlimited, explains, “Nitro is the underlying pla...
Security and Service Assurance Must Rule Financial Services as Threat Actors Remain Relentless
Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at Networks Unlimited Africa The rise of the pandemic last year meant that corporates around the globe had to embrace a highly dispersed, virtualised environment to keep the wheels of business turning. This is now changing the way that banks need to move forward, with both their security as well as their service assurance. So says Darren Anstee, Chief Technology Officer for security at NETSCOUT, a leading global provider of service assurance, security and business analytics. He explains that, at the start of 2020, digital transformation in the financial services sector was already well underway, and the intervening year has only accelerated this transformation. Writing in a recent blog, he notes that, “The COVID-19 lockdown shut branches, forc...
In the Eye of the Storm: New Record is Set by Ten Million DDoS Attacks in One Year
Not all record-breaking numbers are feats or achievements towards which we all aspire. For example, in 2006, American teenager Matt Suter was destined to become the holder of the record for the ‘farthest distance thrown by a tornado and survived’, when he was flung, in an unconscious state, for a distance of almost 400 metres (398.37 metres) by an F2 tornado (meaning wind speeds of 181 to 253 kilometres per hour), yet later regained consciousness almost without a scratch. “We’ve recently had a very thought-provoking record-breaking number released for 2020 in the cybersecurity arena, and it’s not pretty,” says Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at value-added distributor Networks Unlimited. “Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have crossed the 10 million mark dur...
DDoS ‘Tax’ Adds to an Organisation’s Attack Burden, says NETSCOUT
Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at Networks Unlimited Africa Did you ever think about the ‘tax’ you pay as an organisation in the event of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack? In a nutshell, DDoS attacks by threat actors don’t only have a negative effect on businesses and their customers – they also take up quantities of internet bandwidth without paying for it. This means that the cost of this traffic falls on the shoulders of every business that does pay for the internet service. This is according to the NETSCOUT ‘2020 1H Threat Intelligence Report’, in which NETSCOUT, a leading global provider of service assurance, security and business analytics, introduces its DDoS Attack Coefficient. The figure summarises the amount of DDoS traffic going through regional netw...
NZ Stock Exchange DDoS Attacks Remind Enterprises to Check Defence Security
Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at Networks Unlimited Africa At the end of August, a series of cyberattacks on the New Zealand Stock Exchange over five consecutive days forced it to halt trading for a number of hours for four out of those five days. The attacks raised questions about the stock exchange’s security, as well as the threat actors’ underlying motives. “This was a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) incidents, in which threat actors disrupted the normal traffic to the enterprise by overwhelming the target with a flood of internet traffic at volumes that the system just couldn’t handle,” explains Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM at value-added distributor Networks Unlimited Africa. “In financial services terms, the New Zealand Stock Exchange is a re...
NETSCOUT Proves it’s Ready to Take on Threat Actors
Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at Networks Unlimited Africa Midway through June, American citizens thought the country was experiencing the world’s biggest-ever distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which seemed to be taking down internet service providers, social media platforms, and online services from gaming to banking. It very quickly turned out that no such attack was underway at all, as reported by Forbes, but the most interesting point was that so many citizens in the world’s most technology-enabled Western country believed the story so quickly. “A DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of internet traffic,” explains Ris...
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