Romania, in top 10 countries with the highest number of C&C servers for DDoS attacks

Romania ranks 6^th among countries with the highest number of C&C servers for DDoS attacks, according to a recent Kaspersky Lab Report.

However, in the first quarter of 2017, the Kaspersky DDoS Intelligence system recorded DDoS attacks against resources in 72 countries, which is eight less than in the fourth quarter of 2016. The Netherlands and the UK replaced Japan and France among the top 10 countries with the most DDoS victims.

South Korea remained the leader in terms of the number of detected C&C servers. The US came second in this respect, followed by the Netherlands, which dislodged China from the top three for the first time since monitoring began. The latter dropped from second to seventh place. Japan, Ukraine and Bulgaria all left the top 10 ranking of countries with the highest number of C&C servers. They were replaced by Hong Kong, Romania and Germany.

“There’s typically a pronounced decline in the number of DDoS attacks at the beginning of the year, and this trend has continued now for five years. This may be due to cybercriminals or their clients taking a break. However, despite this now familiar downturn, we still recorded more attacks between January and March of this year than we did in the first quarter of 2016, which confirms the conclusion that the overall number of DDoS attacks is growing. So now is not the time to let your guard down; rather, it’s better to take care of your protection before the cybercriminals get back to their usual work routine,” Kirill Ilganaev, Head of Kaspersky DDoS Protection at Kaspersky Lab, commented.

Distribution by operating system also changed in Q1 2017. In the previous quarter, Linux-based IoT botnets were the most popular, but they were squeezed out by Windows-based botnets, whose share grew from 25 percent to 60 percent in the first quarter.

Overall, the quarter was relatively quiet: the largest number of attacks (994) was observed on 18 February. The longest DDoS attack in Q1 2017 only lasted 120 hours, which is significantly lower than the previous quarter’s maximum of 292 hours.