Verisign recently released its Q3 2015 DDoS Trends Report, and the most notable observation is that DDoS activity increased in Q3 to the highest it’s been in any quarter over the last two years. And, Verisign mitigated 53 percent more attacks in the third quarter of this year than in the preceding quarter.

Additional notable observations and insights from Q3 2015 include:

·         Verisign saw the average attack size increase to 7.03 Gbps, 27 percent higher than Q2 2015.

·         Fifty-nine percent of attacks peaked at more than 1 Gbps; 20 percent of attacks were greater than 10 Gbps

·         For the fourth quarter in a row, the industry most frequently targeted by DDoS attacks was IT Services/Cloud/SaaS, representing 29 percent of mitigation activity in Q3. Media and Entertainment closely followed representing 26 percent of mitigations. The Financial and Payments sector remains a heavily-targeted industry, representing 15 percent of all Verisign mitigations

·         The most common attacks mitigated were Network Time Protocol (NTP), Domain Name System (DNS) and Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) UDP floods, which collectively accounted for approximately 65 percent of attacks in the quarter