Page 130 - Cyber Defense eMagazine Annual RSA Edition for 2024
P. 130
Thwarting The Reconnaissance Missions of
DDoS Attackers
By Gary Sockrider, Director, Security Solutions, NETSCOUT
It cannot be underestimated how skillful bad actors are getting with engineering new distributed denial-
of-service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks now span different geographies and industries, targeting a
diverse array of businesses, organizations, and individuals around the globe. What’s even more
unsettling than the global proliferation of these DDoS attacks is that they now include intricate levels of
reconnaissance by attackers.
Attackers in the past worked on an ad hoc basis, targeting disparate industries across different
geographies with a frequency that seemed to occur at random. Now, there is much more of a focus on
attackers targeting specific industries (e.g., financial services) to probe for weak spots. In fact, bad actors
are now monitoring networks and running reconnaissance during an attack to understand what’s working
or not and changing tactics to avoid detection or distract their target defenses.
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