This blog post was co-authored by Anupam Vij, Principal PM Manager & Syed Pasha, Principal Network Engineer, Azure Networking.

2020 was a year unlike any other. It brought major disruptions to both the physical and digital worlds, and these changes are also evident in the cyberthreat landscape. The prevalence of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks in 2020 has grown more than 50 percent with increasing complexity and a significant increase in the volume of DDoS traffic.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, billions of people across the world have been confined to their home environments, working, learning, and even socializing remotely, and internet traffic has exploded. Now, DDoS attacks are one of the largest security concerns: the surges in internet traffic make it easier for attackers to launch DDoS attacks since they don’t have to generate as much traffic to bring down services. Cybercriminals can exploit huge traffic streams to launch DDoS attacks, which makes it harder to distinguish between legitimate and malicious traffic.

At Microsoft, the Azure DDoS Protection team protects every property in Microsoft and the entire Azure infrastructure. This past year, we continued to defend against DDoS attacks in the face of an ever-evolving cyber landscape and unprecedented challenges. In this review, we share trends and insights into DDoS attacks we observed and mitigated throughout 2020.

2020 DDoS attack trends

COVID-19 drove a sharp increase in DDoS attacks

Throughout the year, we mitigated an average of 500 unique attacks a day. In total, we mitigated upwards of 200,000 unique DDoS attacks against our global infrastructure.

The peak attack period was during March to April 2020 with the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak, as countries across the globe implemented lockdowns and stay at home measures. We mitigated around 800 to 1,000 attacks per day, more than 50 percent higher than pre-COVID levels during the same time in previous years.

Short bursts of high-volume attacks

In 2020, we observed a trend towards high volume attacks with shorter durations. Multi-vector attacks continued to be prevalent as well.

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