According to the latest Prolexic Quarterly Global DDoS Attack Report for Q2 of 2014, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack activity and attack sizes have remained elevated throughout the first half of this year. While DDoS activity normally fluctuates, these results are particularly significant, as activity has instead continued near Q1's record-setting levels.

Compared to this time last year, DDoS attacks have become shorter, but stronger. The report reveals average attack bandwidth is up 72% and peak bandwidth increased more than 240% since Q2 of 2013. At the same time, attack duration dropped significantly, now averaging 17 hours per attack.

Attacks are getting larger and more aggressive. Malicious actors were able to generate such large attack sizes by employing reflection and amplification techniques and by infiltrating vulnerable, but powerful, servers instead of PCs. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors with server instances running software with known vulnerabilities, including versions of the Linux, Apache, MySQUL and Microsoft Windows server operating systems are just some of the targets for attacks. Also targeted are vulnerable versions of common web Content Management Systems (CMS), such as WordPress, Joomla, or their plugins.

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