News
Arbor Networks and Alphabet’s Jigsaw Collaborate to Enhance the Digital Attack Map Showing the Global Nature of the DDoS Threat
October 2016 by Marc Jacob
Arbor Networks Inc., the security division of NETSCOUT, in conjunction with Jigsaw, an incubator within Alphabet, Google’s parent company announced an enhanced version of the Digital Attack Map, a live data visualization of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks around the globe.
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 visualization 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.
