Anyone who has lived through their teenage years knows that not all trends are good, just think about very thin eyebrows and dramatically flared jeans. The same goes for what may be your chief concern today - distributed denial of service attacks that can take down your website and do serious damage to your business – this is something you need to be informed about.

Defining DDoS

According to DDoS mitigation service providers Imperva Incapsula, DDoS attacks, or distributed denial of service attacks, are malicious attempts to make an online service like a website unavailable to its users. This is typically accomplished by chewing up the bandwidth of the target or overwhelming the network infrastructure with malicious traffic.

The consequences of a successful distributed denial of service attack are felt in both the short and long-term. It causes an immediate loss of traffic and possibly revenue, and can cause diminished loyalty or trust amongst users, affecting whether or not they return to the website or service. A DDoS attack can also cause software damage, hardware damage, or act as a smokescreen to an intrusion that leads to the theft of sensitive data such as financial information, user information or intellectual property.

Truly hideous trends

With the rapid way cyberattacks evolve, it seems as though every few months brings with it new and delightful DDoS trends. These are some of the ones you need to be aware of in 2016.

1. Attackers are turning up the volume

Volumetric attacks that flood a target and saturate the available network bandwidth are nothing new, but these days they’re bigger, more sophisticated and longer lasting. This is significant because even companies that are equipped with large amounts of connectivity and bandwidth could have their capacity exhausted by this sort of attack, leading to major additional bandwidth bills.

2. Combo flooding is the new normal

SYN floods that take advantage of the TCP handshake to request network connections without ever transmitting any acknowledgements in order to open the connections are also nothing new. But what’s new is just how common combo SYN floods have become in which attackers use a concurrent combination of regular SYN packets to exhaust server resources and large SYN packets to cause network saturation. These combo attacks now account for 75% of all large scale DDoS attacks and render traditional distributed denial of service mitigation solutions ineffective.

3. Or are you caught in a hit and run

Instead of the steady onslaught of malicious traffic that you may associate with DDoS attacks, one of the biggest trends going right now is the hit and run attack in which short packet bursts occur at seemingly random intervals over a long period of time. These attacks are designed to get the best of on-demand mitigation solutions that require manual activation for every burst.

4. Botnets are busy

Research has shown that 30% of distributed denial of service botnets are responsible for attacking over 50 targets each per month. This points to botnets – networks of compromised devices used to launch DDoS attacks – being shared between attackers as well as being offered up in DDoS for hire schemes. DDoS for hire has been exponentially increasing in popularity over the last couple of years, and we’re at the point now where anyone with a PayPal account can launch an attack.

5. To the multi-vector goes the spoils

These days a whopping 81% of distributed denial of service attacks use more than one attack vector, typically a combination of volumetric attacks, state-exhaustion attacks and application layer attacks. This strategy is appealing because by targeting multiple network resources an attacker ups his or her chances of success. An attacker may also use one vector as a decoy while doing the real damage with another.

6. Even DDoS attacks are going mobile

Smartphones and tablets are ubiquitous now, so it was only a matter of time before these mobile, internet-connected devices were being used in distributed denial of service attacks. This is largely because these devices have weaker security than a computer would. Mitigating mobile-based attacks is complex because traditional firewalls can’t be used to block source IP addresses on a mobile network as it would interfere with legitimate traffic.

Looking for a good DDoS trend?

If website and business owners could band together and make investing in truly effective DDoS mitigation the next trend, these last six trends would look like child’s play.

If you’re in the market for distributed denial of service mitigation that will protect you and your business, look for a solution that is cloud-based, has a high-capacity network, has automatic detection and mitigation instead of on-demand, is always-on, promises minimal disruption for your website users, and employs visitor identification, risk analysis and progressive challenges for handling suspected bots. After all, if you’ve ever rocked feathered hair, a stonewashed denim jacket or a pair of zubaz, don’t you owe it to yourself to jump on a good trend?