Hacker attacks down: it’s just the calm before the storm

According to Kaspersky, DDoS attacks decreased in the first quarter of 2017. This is a temporary figure and will grow in the coming months

In the flurry of alarming news that arrives daily and concerns cybersecurity, there is one that allows you to breathe a sigh of relief. At least for a while. According to Kaspersky, a well-known company expert in cybersecurity, hacker attacks are decreasing.

Kaspersky's DDoS Intelligence system has recorded, in fact, an important decrease in the number of countries affected by DDoS attacks, violations launched remotely on a large scale: in the first three months of 2017 there were only 72 attacks, eight less than in the fourth quarter of 2016. And that's not all. According to the analysis conducted again by Kaspersky, in the same period also changed the ranking of the 10 countries where the most DDoS attacks were detected. At the first two places we no longer find France and Japan, but the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. While attacks have decreased, they have also become more sophisticated and therefore more difficult to detect.

Botnets use Windows

In relation to the number of C&C servers, i.e. the computers that control the dense network of botnets (devices infected with malware) and that initiate the DDoS attack, the first position is occupied by South Korea, followed by the United States and the Netherlands. Surprising is the figure for China, which rises from second to seventh position. Continuing with Kaspersky's survey, the ranking is also different with regard to the operating systems on which hackers based their botnets. While in the fourth quarter of 2016, the "zombie computer" networks were mostly based on Linux, in the first three months of 2017, however, the open-source software platform was surpassed by Windows.

Taking a closer look at Kaspersky's report, we find that the day with the highest concentration of DDoS attacks was February 18.

Although down from the previous quarter, the attacks are on the rise when compared to the data recorded in the same period of 2016. This means, as the same cybersecurity company warns, that the number of cyber breaches in 2017 is set to rise.