Ransom distributed denial-of-service attacks in the first quarter of 2022 were 28% lower than the same period last year and 52% lower than the last quarter of 2021, with only 3% of Cloudflare clients targeted by DDoS attacks in March reporting that they have been extorted, reports BleepingComputer.
However, application-layer DDoS attacks have risen year-over-year, with the highest increases observed in attacks against the consumer electronics sector and online media industry, according to a Cloudflare report. Moreover, threat actors have also been increasingly leveraging the reflection-amplification approach in DDoS attacks. Publicly-exposed Lantronix devices have been targeted with 4-byte requests that are then amplified by 7.5 times and threat actors could further amplify the attacks should more devices are included. The report also revealed that volumetric DDoS attacks have significantly increased, with such attacks more than 100 Gbps and those more than 10 Mpps rising by 645% and more than 300%, compared with the previous quarter.
Included in the exposed dataset labeled "PDL" were individuals' full names, email addresses, phone numbers, location data, professional summaries, and skills, as well as education and employment histories.
Attackers could leverage the issue — which impacts Nexus 3000, 7000, and 9000 series switches with vulnerable NX-OS versions with DHCPv6 activated and are in standalone NX-OS mode — to facilitate continuous crashes of the dhcp_snoop process and a denial-of-service condition.
Higher rewards of up to $250,000 will be given by Google for the discovery of memory corruption flaws in the Chrome browser shown to achieve remote code execution using a non-sandboxed process as part of a more robust vulnerability reward program.