2021 was an action-packed year for Qrator Labs.
It started with the official celebration of our tenth year anniversary, continued with massive routing incidents, and ended with the infamous Meris botnet we reported back in September.
Now it is time to look at the events of the last quarter of 2021. There are interesting details in the BGP section, like the new records in route leaks and hijacking ASes, but first things first, as we start with the DDoS attacks statistics.
DDoS attacks send ripples on the ocean of the Internet, produced by creations of various sizes - botnets. Some of them feed at the top of the ocean, but there also exists a category of huge, deep water monstrosities that are rare and dangerous enough they could be seen only once in a very long time.
November 2021 we encountered, and mitigated, several attacks from a botnet, that seems to be unrelated to one described and/or well-known, like variants of Mirai, Bashlite, Hajime or Brickerbot.
Although our findings are reminiscent of Mirai, we suppose this botnet is not based purely on propagating Linux malware, but a combination of brute forcing and exploiting already patched CVEs in unpatched devices to grow the size of it. Either way, to confirm how exactly this botnet operates, we need to have a sample device to analyze, which isn’t our area of expertise.
This time, we won’t give it a name. It is not 100% clear what we are looking at, what are the exact characteristics of it, and how big this thing actually is. But there are some numbers, and where possible, we have made additional reconnaissance in order to better understand what we’re dealing with.
But let us first show you the data we’ve gathered, and leave conclusions closer to the end of this post.
Hello, everybody!
My name is Alexander Zubkov and today I’d like to talk about routing loops.
The third quarter of 2021 brought a massive upheaval in the scale and intensity of DDoS attacks worldwide.
It all led to September when together with Yandex, we uncovered one of the most devastating botnets since the Mirai and named it Meris, as it was held accountable for a series of attacks with a very high RPS rate. And as those attacks were aimed all over the world, our quarterly statistics also changed.
This quarter, we've also prepared for your consideration a slice of statistics on the application layer (L7) DDoS attacks. Without further ado, let us elaborate on the details of DDoS attacks statistics and BGP incidents for Q3, 2021.
Introduction
For the last five years, there have virtually been almost no global-scale application-layer attacks.
During this period, the industry has learned how to cope with the high bandwidth network layer attacks, including amplification-based ones. It does not mean that botnets are now harmless.
End of June 2021, Qrator Labs started to see signs of a new assaulting force on the Internet – a botnet of a new kind. That is a joint research we conducted together with Yandex to elaborate on the specifics of the DDoS attacks enabler emerging in almost real-time.
The year 2021 started on such a high note for Qrator Labs: on January 19, our company celebrated its 10th anniversary. Shortly after, in February, our network mitigated quite an impressive 750 Gbps DDoS attack based on old and well known DNS amplification. Furthermore, there is a constant flow of BGP incidents; some are becoming global routing anomalies. We started reporting in our newly made Twitter account for Qrator.Radar.
Nevertheless, with the first quarter of the year being over, we can take a closer look at DDoS attacks statistics and BGP incidents for January - March 2021.
By the beginning of 2021, Qrator Labs filtering network expands to 14 scrubbing centers and a total of 3 Tbps filtering bandwidth capacity, with the San Paolo scrubbing facility fully operational in early 2021;
New partner services fully integrated into Qrator Labs infrastructure and customer dashboard throughout 2020: SolidWall WAF and RuGeeks CDN;
Upgraded filtering logic allows Qrator Labs to serve even bigger infrastructures with full-scale cybersecurity protection and DDoS attacks mitigation;
The newest AMD processors are now widely used by Qrator Labs in packet processing.
DDoS attacks were on the rise during 2020, with the most relentless attacks described as short and overwhelmingly intensive.
However, BGP incidents were an area where it was evident that some change was and still is needed, as there was a significant amount of devastating hijacks and route leaks.
In 2020, we began providing our services in Singapore under a new partnership and opened a new scrubbing center in Dubai, where our fully functioning branch is staffed by the best professionals to serve local customers.
This is a transcription of a talk that was presented at CSNOG 2020 — video is at the end of the page
In the beginning, there was the Word… which quickly became communication protocol in need of an upgrade.
