By Andrew Cockburn, Principal Consulting Engineer, NETSCOUT, and Rich Compton, DDoS Special Interest Group Chair, M3AAWG; Principal Network Security Engineer III, Charter Communications

This is the first installment of M3AAWG’s “State of the Union” series, where members provide updates on prominent, evolving issues and events in the industry. 

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are used by cybercriminals to shut down networks and websites, and targets can range from a single website to major services. Today, we’re seeing an increase in the sheer amount of DDoS attacks, part of a continuous upward trajectory over the past 30+ years.  Further, tactics are rapidly evolving, yet range in sophistication. In turn, experts are constantly working to pinpoint new techniques and mitigate attacks. Generally, once professionals notice or identify a new type of channel or vector, it's a race to patch, resolve, and add mitigations for the new attack vector before its usage becomes widespread.