Lumen's Mark Dehus tracks DDoS threats

Mark Dehus, director of Information Security and Threat Intelligence for Lumen Technologies, joins the podcast to share key findings from the operator's Q3 DDoS report and his predictions for DDoS trends in Q4.

"In attacks observed over Q3, we noticed a significant growth in terms of complexity," said Dehus. Reflection attacks – volumetric attacks that amplify the impact of an attack on a specific protocol such as Domain Network System (DNS) protocols – are among the DDoS attacks on the rise, he said.

In addition, Dehus explains why multi-vector DDoS attacks were more common than single vector, why voice and VoIP attacks are on the rise and which verticals were hit the hardest by bad actors.

"Some [bad] actors and collective set of actors realize that there are some services out there that are very critical – voice services, for example ... and some of those services haven't been attacked to this degree or scale before in the past," said Dehus. "Some bad actors realize there's potential here to cause disruption and in some cases, make money off of ransomware or extortion."

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading