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. 

The global uncertainty created by COVID-19 has left many individuals and organizations vulnerable to online scams and other cyberattacks, making our work and the work of our members, more important than ever. To facilitate anti-abuse collaboration and the development of security best-practices, while ensuring the health and safety of our members, we’re excited to host our 49th General Meeting from June 8-11, 2020 virtually for the first time ever.

Author: Amy Cadagin (M3AAWG Executive Director)

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was designed to harmonize different data privacy laws across European countries in an effort to protect the privacy and data protection rights of individuals and empower them to better understand and make decisions on who processes their data and in what way.

This February, M3AAWG awarded Cristine Hoepers, Ph.D., the general manager of CERT.br, the Brazilian national Computer Emergency Response Team, with the annual Mary Litynski Award. Now in its tenth year, this award honors the memory of Mary and the work she did to shape M3AAWG into the leading organization that it is today, one that is dedicated to fighting online abuse such as malware, DDoS attacks, election security attacks, and more.