The ninth Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report also found more than a third of organisations surveyed had been targeted by advanced persistent threats in the past year.
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The report was based on survey data provided by service provider, enterprise, cloud, hosting and other network operators from around the world.
Arbor Networks president, Matthew Moynahan, said ISP, enterprise, IT and security teams faced a dynamic threat landscape from very skilled and patient adversaries.
"There is no single, magic bullet solution and it is a mistake to think technology alone can secure a network. Multi-layered defenses are clearly needed, but so is a commitment to best practices for people and process."
The report also found the proportion of respondents seeing APTs on their networks has increased from 22 per cent to 30 per cent year-over-year, while 57 per cent of survey respondents did not have a solution deployed to identify employee-owned devices accessing the corporate network. Denial of service attacks against mobile networks more than doubled with nearly a quarter of those respondents offering mobile services indicated that they have seen DDoS attacks impacting their mobile Internet (Gi) infrastructure.
More than 20 per cent offering mobile services indicated that they had suffered a customer-visible outage due to a security incident, down slightly from about one-third last year. Application-layer attacks have become ubiquitous. They are now common with almost all respondents indicating they have seen them during this survey period.
There was also a dramatic rise in DDoS attack size.
In all previous years of the survey, the largest reported attack was 100 Gbps. This year, attacks peaked at 309 Gbps and multiple respondents reported attacks larger than 100 Gbps. Datacentres were a magnet for DDoS attacks. More than 70 percent operating data centres reported DDoS attacks this year, up dramatically from under a half last year.
The report found DNS infrastructure remained vulnerable. Just over one-third experienced customer-impacting DDoS attacks on DNS infrastructure--an increase from a quarter last year.
But more than a quarter indicated that there was no security group within their organisations with formal responsibility for DNS security, up from 19 per cent last year.
This increase is surprising given the number of high-profile DNS reflection/amplification attacks that were seen during the survey period. The survey consisted of 220 responses, up from 130 last year, from a mix of Tier 1 and Tier 2/3 service providers, hosting, mobile, enterprise and other types of network operators from around the world.