Netscout today announced findings from its bi-annual Threat Intelligence Report, punctuated by a record-setting 10,089,687 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks observed during 2020. Cybercriminals exploited vulnerabilities exposed by massive internet usage shifts since many users were no longer protected by enterprise-grade security. Attackers paid particular attention to vital pandemic industries such as eCommerce, streaming services, online learning, and healthcare generating a 20% year-over-year increase in attack frequency over 2019 plus a 22% increase in the last six months of 2020. In August, a threat actor Netscout dubbed Lazarus Bear Armada (LBA) launched one of the most sustained and extensive DDoS extortion campaigns yet seen, taking down the New Zealand stock exchan...
Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at Networks Unlimited Africa Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest provider of on-demand cloud computing platforms, has now expanded its Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) Traffic Mirroring to support additional select non-Nitro Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance types. As a result of this expansion, NETSCOUT is enabled to provide end-to-end visibility for security and service assurance of even more applications and services that are used in AWS. NETSCOUT, a leading global provider of service assurance, security and business analytics, is distributed throughout Africa by Networks Unlimited. Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at value-added distributor Networks Unlimited, explains, “Nitro is the underlying pla...
Not all record-breaking numbers are feats or achievements towards which we all aspire. For example, in 2006, American teenager Matt Suter was destined to become the holder of the record for the ‘farthest distance thrown by a tornado and survived’, when he was flung, in an unconscious state, for a distance of almost 400 metres (398.37 metres) by an F2 tornado (meaning wind speeds of 181 to 253 kilometres per hour), yet later regained consciousness almost without a scratch. “We’ve recently had a very thought-provoking record-breaking number released for 2020 in the cybersecurity arena, and it’s not pretty,” says Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at value-added distributor Networks Unlimited. “Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have crossed the 10 million mark dur...
Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM Division at Networks Unlimited Africa At the end of August, a series of cyberattacks on the New Zealand Stock Exchange over five consecutive days forced it to halt trading for a number of hours for four out of those five days. The attacks raised questions about the stock exchange’s security, as well as the threat actors’ underlying motives. “This was a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) incidents, in which threat actors disrupted the normal traffic to the enterprise by overwhelming the target with a flood of internet traffic at volumes that the system just couldn’t handle,” explains Risna Steenkamp, General Manager: ESM at value-added distributor Networks Unlimited Africa. “In financial services terms, the New Zealand Stock Exchange is a re...