India is one of the top target countries for web application attacks in second quarter of 2017, according to a new study. The country is also one of the top web application attack sources during the same period.
According to a report by cloud delivery firm Akamai, the number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in Q2 2017 increased by 28 percent quarter over quarter and the attackers hit the target on an average of 32 times over the quarter.
The incidence of Web application attacks increased five percent quarter-over-quarter and 28 percent year-over-year, and India stands in the eighth position among the countries most frequently attacked.
The United States tops the list of countries for web application attacks in Q2 2017 with more than 218 million attacks, followed by the United Kingdom (32.5 million), Brazil (27.8 million), Japan (10.3 million), Singapore (7.8 million), Sweden (7.2 million), Germany (6.6 million), India (6.5 million), China (5.9 million) and Netherlands (5.3 million).
The US also tops the list of Global web application attack source countries in Q2 2017 with more than 122 million attacks sourced (33.8 percent), followed by China (10.2 percent), Brazil (8.2 percent), Netherlands (6.4 percent), India (3.3 percent), Ukraine (3.3 percent), Russia (3.1 percent), France (2.9 percent), Germany (2.9 percent), and Canada (2.2 percent).
The report said "while many of the botnet's C2 nodes were observed conducting "dedicated attacks" against select IPs, even more were noted as participating in what would be considered "pay-for-play" attacks."
"Events like the Mirai botnet, the exploitation used by WannaCry and Petya, the continued rise of SQLi attacks and the re-emergence of PBot all illustrate how attackers will not only migrate to new tools but also return to old tools that have previously proven highly effective," said Martin McKeay, Akamai senior security advocate, in a statement.
Egypt has the highest number of unique IP addresses used in frequent DDoS attacks amounting to 32 percent of the global total in Q2 2017. It is followed by the US (8 percent), Turkey (5 percent), China (5 percent), and India (5 percent). However, the number of IP addresses involved in volumetric DDoS attacks dropped 98 percent from 595,000 to 11,000.
Gaming had the lion's share of the overall attack traffic with 81 percent of the DDoS attack in Q2 2017, followed by Internet & telecom (5 percent), financil services (4 percent), software & consumer goods (3 percent), media & enternainment (2 percent), retail & consumer goods (1 percent), education (1 percent), and other (2 percent).
