Fancy Lazarus, a well-known distributed denial of service (DDoS) extortionist, has resurfaced with a new campaign focused on organizations with unprotected assets across all sizes of companies in all industries, according to Radware.

Radware’s recently released “Quarterly DDoS Attack Report, which provides an overview of attack activity witnessed during the first quarter of 2021, found that while the total number of attacks held fairly steady from the previous quarter, attack volumes were up dramatically.

Distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks - when an attacker attempts to make it impossible for a service to be deliverable - are increasing in size, frequency and duration. Kaspersky Lab reported a doubling of DDoS attacks in the first quarter of 2020 compared with the fourth quarter of 2019, plus an 80% jump compared with the same quarter last year. To learn more about how these attacks have evolved over the years, we talk to Roy Horev, Co-Founder and CTO at Vulcan Cyber, a vulnerability remediation orchestration provider.

Radware recently published a cybersecurity alert, warning users were once again being targeted by DDoS extortionists for a second time by a global ransom DDoS campaign that initially started in August 2020. Organizations received new letter that said, "Maybe you forgot us, but we didn’t forget you. We were busy working on more profitable projects, but now we are back.”

Iranian cyber threat actors have been continuously improving their offensive cyber capabilities. They continue to engage in more conventional offensive cyber activities ranging from website defacement, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and theft of personally identifiable information (PII), to more advanced activities—including social media-driven influence operations, destructive malware, and, potentially, cyber-enabled kinetic attacks, warns the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are more than an inconvenience; they paralyze operations and cause significant direct and indirect costs to those affected. Over 23,000 DDoS attacks are recorded per day, leaving companies to deal with disrupted online services. Recently, New Zealand’s Stock Exchange (NZX) was hit by a large DDoS attack for four consecutive days which led to a stock market closure that barred many from trading.

Although DDoS as a threat vector may have been overshadowed in the media as a result of several high-profile ransomware operations this year, instances of DDoS attacks show little sign of slowing down as a common tool for malicious actors. According to new Digital Shadows research, 2020 saw the largest DDoS attack on record, peaking at rate of 2.3 terabytes per second and causing three days of downtime for the targeted business.

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.

U.S. Attorney Bryan Schroder announced that a Washington man has been sentenced to federal prison for his role in a long-running scheme in which he and his criminal associates developed distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnets.