New threat portal pegs DDoS attacks at 2,570 a day

More than 2,500 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks take place every day worldwide, according to data from Arbor Networks’ new Atlas Threat Portal.

The newly-launched portal combines Arbor’s threat intelligence and analysis enabled by collaboration with 270 service providers with industry-wide news and social media content.

The portal delivers a subset of the intelligence derived from the Atlas (active threat level analysis system) network on host/port scanning activity, zero-day exploits and worm propagation, security events, vulnerability disclosures and dynamic botnet and phishing infrastructures.

On its first day of official operation, the portal revealed that DDoS attacks have peaked at 54.66Gbps on 30 July 2013 and that there were 1,137 botnets active.

The Atlas portal is a public resource combining more than 45Tbps of peak traffic data in order to generate a global view into the threat landscape.

This massive data set enables Arbor’s Security Engineering & Response Team (ASERT) to study malware, botnets and DDoS attacks that threaten network infrastructure and services.

The portal gives users access to global threat intelligence, including data on attacks, targets, sources, botnets, malware, and phishing.

The portal also includes in-depth blog posts of Internet traffic trends, DDoS attacks, new malware families and other advanced threats.

Infographics, white papers, special reports such as the Enterprise Threat Landscape Report, and industry news and social media activity are also available.

“This portal allows us to share global threat information with the community at-large, to feature our team of expert analysts, highlight their research and integrate the latest news and social activity that is going on across the industry,” said Dan Holden, Arbor Networks director of security research.

“The dashboard has a great mix of data, analysis, news and social commentary that is constantly updated and relevant to what is going on in our industry,” he said.

Earlier this week, Arbor Networks published a report that found that DDoS attacks continue to be a global threat with a clear increase in attack size, speed and complexity

The report said the average size of DDoS attacks is up 43% so far this year, with 46.5% of attacks now over 1Gbps, a jump of 13.5% from 2012.

Nearly half of all monitored attacks are now above 1Gbps, said the report, which is based on data from the Atlas internet monitoring system.