Microsoft admits that distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks within Azure have seen “a sharp increase” in the first half of 2021.
Compared to Q4 of 2020, the average daily number of attack mitigations in the first half of 2021 increased by 25 percent.
Microsoft “mitigated” 1,392 attacks per day, with the maximum daily amount hitting 2,043 attacks on May 24.
There were over 250,000 unique attacks against the Azure infrastructure during the six-month period.
Just over one per cent of these attacks impact Australian users. The most-attacked regions were the United States (59 percent), Europe (19 percent), and East Asia (6 percent), which Microsoft credits to the “concentration of financial services and gaming industries” in these regions.
“With the increased usage and supply of IoT devices as well as cryptocurrency like Bitcoin (which is hard to trace), we see a rise in ransomware and ransom DDoS attacks, whose victims included Mexico’s national lottery sites as well as Bitcoin.org, among others,” Microsoft explains.
“The online gaming vertical continues to be a very attractive target of DDoS attacks, as experienced by Respawn Entertainment throughout the past few months who suffered significant disruptions to Titanfall’s gameplay.
“More industries are being targeted, particularly higher education, healthcare, telecoms, and public sectors.”
