Pulse Wave: a new DDoS technique

DDoS attacks are an extremely unpleasant thing and cause a great deal of trouble to the owners of the sites they are aimed at. A site going down and becoming unavailable to users is the result of a DDoS attack. There are different techniques for carrying out DDoS attacks; today we will describe one of them — Pulse Wave. 

Specialists at Imperva Incapsula have published a report describing the Pulse Wave DDoS technique. It is becoming popular among cyber criminals.

Analysts noticed the unusual shape of the DDoS attack graphs. Attacks now look like short pulses repeating at equal intervals. Their peak power reaches 350 Gbit/s, and such attacks can go on for several days.

This approach lets cyber criminals solve two problems at once. They can attack not one target but several at a time, because once a short pulse ends the botnet starts attacking another target. On top of that, the structure of such an attack is difficult for DDoS protection systems built on hybrid defence techniques.

The first line of defence is hardware, the second is cloud based. If the first line — the hardware — cannot cope with an attack, the equipment has to request support from the cloud.

But with Pulse Wave an attack starts abruptly and ends just as abruptly. So the hardware cannot cope with the traffic and has no time to request support from the cloud. Each short pulse of this type of DDoS attack therefore knocks out the attacked company's equipment. Getting everything working again takes several minutes, but the pulses resume and the attack stretches out over a long period.

You can read more about Pulse Wave here.

Based on material from https://xakep.ru