NetScout Systems’ latest Threat Intelligence Report (Issue 6) has found that cyber-criminals exploited vulnerabilities exposed by massive internet usage shifts, since many employee-users were no longer protected by enterprise-grade security. Attackers paid particular attention to vital pandemic industries such as e-commerce, 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 two quarters of 2020.

The number of enterprise respondents reporting DDoS extortion attacks increased by 125%, Netscout’s report found. Overloaded firewalls and VPN concentrators, crucial technologies used during the pandemic lockdown, contributed to the outages in 83% of the enterprises that suffered DDoS attacks. This finding represents a 21% increase over 2019 figures.

NetScout Systems’ Threat Intelligence Report’s other headline findings include:

1. Threat actors increased their DDoS onslaught due to the pandemic lockdown; monthly DDoS attacks exceeded 800,000 in March and never looked back, representing a new normal for DDoS attack activity. On average, there were 839,083 attacks per month in 2020, an increase of nearly 130 thousand attacks over 2019

2. Attackers using Miraimalware and its variants took advantage of shifts away from enterprise-grade protection to generate a surge in brute-force attempts on Internet of Things (IoT) consumer-grade devices. Threat actors absorbed more devices into their botnets tofurther strengthen the frequency, size, and throughput of DDoS attacks worldwide, according to the report