InfoRiskToday Compliance March 29, 2021 March 25, 2021 DougOlenick) • January 27, 2021 Get Permission The number of distributed denial-of-service attacks launched in 2020 surpassed 10 million, up from 8.5 million in 2019, according to NetScout's Atlas Security Engineering and Response Team. DDoS attacks are often waged as part of extortion campaigns, with hackers threatening to escalate attacks if a ransom is not paid. NetScout noted the the number of DDoS attacks exceeded 800,000 per month starting in March 2020, when the spread of the COVID-19 virus was declared a pandemic, peaking in May 2020 when 929,000 were launched. By comparison, the number of attacks each month averaged about 725,000 in 2019. "DDoS attack count, bandwidth and throughput all saw significant increases since the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic," say NetScout researchers Richard Hummel and Carol Hildebrand, citing the company’s findings.