Dive Brief:

• The Department of Homeland Security is funding new research to stop distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, according to a DHS Science and Technology Directorate.
• DHS is launching the effort in response to an increasing number of DDoS attacks over the last several months, including the attack on Dyn in October, which leveraged a botnet to launch a large-scale attack.
• "The goal of the DDoS project is to build effective and easily implemented network defenses and promote adoption of best practices by the private sector to bring about an end to the scourge of DDoS attacks," said Daniel Massey, the project’s manager.

Dive Insight:

The use of botnets to launch DDoS attacks made such attacks bigger and more lethal, so much so that DHS is dedicating time and money to address the issue. In addition to its "regular" duties, DHS is tasked with developing standardized cybersecurity methods and sharing cyber response best practices and tools with other federal agencies.

Last year, the internet witnessed the largest DDoS attacks on record, and Radware predicts that the cybersecurity sector is entering the "1TBps DDoS era" where attacks will continue to become more sophisticated and damaging, and that means lost revenue and productivity. The Dyn attack last year caused disruptions of Netflix, Twitter, Spotify, SoundCloud, GitHub and Reddit, to name a few.

DHS is not the only entity working on this problem. In December, Amazon Web Services introduced a service designed to protect web applications running on AWS from DDoS attacks.