There are millions of DDoS attacks from internet providers worldwide, including a wide range of regional providers, global transit and cloud companies. The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack peaked at 26 million requests per second this past June. These massive botnet-induced attacks are targeting service providers. Carriers and cloud providers deployed billions of dollars of dedicated DDoS scrubber appliances and, for a time, gained the upper hand on the attackers.

These attacks are carried out to degrade or disable the performance and network communications of target systems. These targets can be small or large businesses, internet service providers, manufacturers, retailers, healthcare providers, schools and universities, or other nation-states. Essentially, any entity with an online presence can become a DDoS target.

The bots of a botnet can include computers, smartphones, virtualized machines, and/or a wide range of Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as IP cameras, smart TVs, routers, anything that has internet connectivity and can be compromised. In particular, IoT vulnerabilities and misconfigurations are extremely common in the consumer market making it very easy for hackers to create an IoT botnet.

The explosive growth in IoT and cloud computing paved the way for the rise of IoT botnets that amplifies DDoS attacks today. Combined with an increasingly lucrative extortion market, it represents a major shift in the DDoS threat landscape. This is a dangerous warning that the possibility of a sophisticated DDoS attack and a prolonged service outage will prevent businesses from growing.

IoT devices include a huge range of commercial and consumer devices such as temperature measurement systems, smart TVs, IP cameras, smart door bells, security systems, network routers & switches, and even children’s toys.

Despite a huge amount of commentary and warnings about IoT vulnerabilities and well-understood fixes.