Arbor Networks, in conjunction with Jigsaw, an incubator within Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has announced an enhanced version of the Digital Attack Map, a live data visualisation of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks around the globe. The enhancements to the Digital Attack Map were carried out by the team at Arbor Networks’ Sydney Development Centre in Australia.
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. 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,” said Brian McCann, President of Arbor Networks.
For more information, please visit DigitalAttackMap.com.
About Arbor Networks
Arbor Networks, the security division of NETSCOUT, helps secure the world’s largest enterprise and service provider networks from DDoS attacks and advanced threats. Arbor is the world’s leading provider of DDoS protection in the enterprise, carrier and mobile market segments, according to Infonetics Research. Arbor Networks Spectrum™ advanced threat solution delivers complete network visibility through a combination of packet capture and NetFlow technology, enabling the rapid detection and mitigation of attack campaigns, malware and malicious insiders. Arbor strives to be a “force multiplier,” making network and security teams the experts. Our goal is to provide a richer picture into networks and more security context so customers can solve problems faster and reduce the risks to their business.
To learn more about Arbor products and services, please visit our website at arbornetworks.com or follow on Twitter @ArborNetworks. Arbor’s research, analysis and insight, together with data from the ATLAS global threat intelligence system, can be found at the ATLAS Threat Portal.
