Attackers shifted tactics in Q2 2020, with a 570% increase in bit-and-piece DDoS attacks compared to the same period last year, according to the new Nexusguard Q2 2020 Threat Report. Perpetrators used bit-and-piece attacks to launch various amplification and elaborate UDP-based attacks to flood target networks with traffic. Nexusguard analysts witnessed attacks using much smaller sizes—more than 51% of bit-and-piece attacks were smaller than 30Mbps—to force communications service providers (CSPs) to subject entire networks of traffic to risk mitigation. This causes significant challenges for CSPs and typical threshold-based detection, which is unreliable for pinpointing the specific attacks to apply the correct mitigation.

Improvements in resources and technology will cause botnets to become more sophisticated, helping them increase resilience and evade detection efforts to gain command and control of target systems. The evolution of attacks means CSPs need to detect and identify smaller and more complex attack traffic patterns amongst large volumes of legitimate traffic. Nexusguard analysts recommend service providers switch to deep learning-based predictive models in order to quickly identify malicious patterns and surgically mitigate them before any lasting damage occurs.