NETSCOUTs 16th annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report (WISR) found that in 2020, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) extortion attacks grew by a whopping 125 percent. Nearly half of survey respondents reported an increase in DDoS attacks during the pandemic, many of which targeted vulnerabilities exposed by a significant shift to online services. 83 percent of enterprises that suffered a DDoS attack reported that overloaded firewalls and/or VPN devices contributed to an outage, a 21 percent jump year over year.”]

