Cybersecurity company Kaspersky found that distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks recorded quarterly peaked towards the end of 2021.
The company’s DDoS attacks in Q4 2021 Report found the total number of DDoS attacks that occurred in Q4 2021 was 4.65 times higher compared with Q4 the previous year, then showing an increase of 52% over Q3 2021.
Q4 2021 saw the emergence of several new DDoS botnets, including a zombie network named Abcbot.
The majority of DDoS attacks in Q4 were reported in the United States (43.55%), followed by China (9.96%) and Hong Kong (8.8%). Germany was hit with 4.85% of the attacks, while France suffered 3.75%.
Alexander Gutnikov, a security expert at Kaspersky, said that while the last three months of any year are generally a peak period for DDoS attacks because of the holidays and their associated online retail sales, 2021’s DDoS attack threat landscape was exceptional.