Someone may be targeting online porn sites for destructive hacker attacks, according to findings from a new cybersecurity study. Porn sites, the study found, were far more likely to be hit by distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks than any other type of site, according to a summary of the research published by Info Security Magazine.
But the study also found that most of the destructive hacker attacks were brief in duration—generally under 10 minutes long—which according to the researchers at the cybersecurity firm Imperva indicates that they are the work of hackers-for-hire.
In other words, someone may be paying so called “stresser” groups whose “limited resources tend to be spread thin in order to service as many customers as possible,” with the specific purpose of jamming porn sites, according to the researchers.
DDoS attacks are “one of the most powerful weapons on the internet,” according to the antivirus software maker Norton. The aim of a DDoS attack is to overwhelm a server with so much unexpected traffic that the sites that it hosts simply shut down, or become inaccessible to users.
In a study that ran from May to December of last year, the Imperva researchers found that an average porn site would have been hit with 84.46 DDoS attacks over that time period—or about 10.5 attacks per month, roughly one every three days.
The next most-victimized category was video gaming, with gaming sites hit 13.3 times on average. News media sites were struck by DDos attacks an average of 10.16 times each.
Of all the attacks recorded by the study, in all categories, India was hit the highest number, at 22.57 percent of all attacks noted in the study. The United States was hit with 8.73 percent of the DDoS attacks.
Porn sites have long been a popular target for hackers and other cyber-criminals. A study by Kapersky labs in 2017 found that more than one million users contracted computer viruses and other forms of malicious software, or “malware,” from visiting porn sites.
Photo By ResDigital18 / Wikimedia Commons
