Verisign Mitigates 300 Gbps DDoS Attack and Other Q2 2014 DDoS Trends

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Verisign Mitigates 300 Gbps DDoS Attack and Other Q2 2014 DDoS Trends

	By Danny McPherson Executive Vice President, Technology and Chief Security Officer at Verisign
	August 13, 2014 Views: 11,459 Comments: 1

Click to Enlarge / Download PDFIt has been another busy quarter for the team that works on our DDoS Protection Services here at Verisign. As detailed in the recent release of our Q2 2014 DDoS Trends Report, from April to June of this year, we not only saw a jump in frequency and size of attacks against our customers, we witnessed the largest DDoS attack we’ve ever observed and mitigated—an attack over 300 Gbps against one of our Media and Entertainment customers.

This attack is significant for a number of reasons and I encourage you to read a detailed recounting of the attack timeline as well as the various trends we track in the report.

Here are a few highlights:

Verisign saw a 216 percent increase in average peak attack size over Q1 2014 and a 291 percent increase in average peak attack size year over year.
Overall, Verisign saw an 87 percent increase in peak DDoS attack size year over year.
Attacks in the 5-10 Gbps range increased 33 percent and attacks greater than 10 Gbps increased 16 percent.
65 percent of attacks were greater than 1 Gbps.
Media and Entertainment was the most targeted industry, followed closely by IT Services/Cloud/SaaS, both making up 84 percent of all attacks mitigated in Q2.

If you’d like to read about what we saw in Q1, you can access that report here.

By Danny McPherson, Executive Vice President, Technology and Chief Security Officer at Verisign — Danny is responsible for all aspects of Verisign’s information systems and services, as well as information and corporate security. Additionally, he represents Verisign in key forums focused on critical infrastructure, engineering, research, security, and online trust. With over 20 years of experience in the internet network operations, security, and telecommunications industries, McPherson brings tremendous technical leadership and operational expertise to the company.
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dns resolution Carl Byington – Aug 14, 2014 3:09 PM

http://www.verisigninc.com/assets/VRSN_DDoS_TR_Q1_201405-web.pdf

Trying to resolve that URL, we need:

dig http://www.verisigninc.com ns @a1.verisigndns.com. +edns +norecur
...
http://www.verisigninc.com. 600 IN NS gslb.shared-fo.brn1.verisign.com.

dig http://www.verisigninc.com a @gslb.shared-fo.brn1.verisign.com. +edns +norecur
...
http://www.verisigninc.com. 30 IN A 69.58.187.40

dig http://www.verisigninc.com ns @gslb.shared-fo.brn1.verisign.com. +edns +norecur
...
;; ->>HEADER<

<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 48652

dig

http://www.verisigninc.com a @gslb.shared-fo.brn1.verisign.com. +edns +norecur +nsid
...
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 338

The load balancer at gslb.shared-fo.brn1.verisign.com does not know about NS records, and it chokes on edns options. See rfc5001 from 2007. One might think that verisign could handle an option that was standardized 7 years ago.

# 1 Reply | Link | Report Problems

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