Arbor Networks, in conjunction with Jigsaw, an incubator within Alphabet, has announced an enhanced version of the “Digital Attack Map”, a live data visualisation of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks around the globe.
Jigsaw is focused on addressing online censorship, mitigating the threats from digital attacks, countering violent extremism and protecting people from hate and harassment online.
One of the easiest ways to silence someone online is a DDoS attack. DDoS is an attempt by an attacker to exhaust the resources available to a network, application or service so that genuine users cannot gain access. DDoS attacks have become increasingly popular due to the development of do-it-yourself attack tools and inexpensive attack services. Often, DDoS attacks relate directly to real-world events such as conflicts and political disputes.
Enhancements to the Digital Attack Map
The Digital Attack Map uses data from Arbor Networks’ Active Threat Level Analysis System (ATLAS), a globally scoped threat-monitoring network. ATLAS currently collects 140Tbps of anonymous traffic data from more than 330 service provider customers. This represents approximately one-third of the world’s global Internet traffic. From this unique vantage point, Arbor is ideally positioned to deliver intelligence about DDoS, malware and botnets that threaten Internet infrastructure and network availability.
The data presented in the Digital Attack Map represents a random sample of less than one percent of attacks observed by the ATLAS system, presenting high-level trends in significant attacks. ATLAS data allowed Jigsaw to build a data visualisation that gives users the ability to explore current and historical trends in DDoS attacks, see attacks by country, and make the connection to related news events on a daily basis.
What’s new?
• A change in architecture of the ATLAS system allows the Digital Attack Map to unlock 20X the data of the previous version in terms of the number and scale of the attacks presented.
• The new system architecture moves all of this data from batch processing to real-time streaming, thereby ensuring that the data is up to date, and as accurate as possible.
“DDoS attacks are growing at an alarming rate in terms of size, frequency and complexity. They are the primary threat to the availability of networks, application and online services,” says Brian McCann, president of Arbor Networks. “The Digital Attack Map represents a just a slice of the rich data set that we have in ATLAS and it has been brought to visual life by the engineers at Jigsaw, allowing anyone to see DDoS attacks on a global scale or a country by country basis. Jigsaw is doing important work to educate the public about the DDoS threat, and we are gratified that our data is being showcased on the Digital Attack Map.”
According to Bryan Hamman, territory manager for sub-Saharan Africa at Arbor Networks, Arbor Networks has been working with the world’s leading service providers, enterprises and governments for the past 16 years to protect against DDoS attacks, and has a firm presence in Africa. “Visualisation of attacks on a country by country basis will highlight this ever-growing threat and alert companies operating in the region to take a strategic look as to how to ensure the safety of their data,” he adds.