With IPv6 adoption comes new security challenges. Although only 25 percent of websites completely support IPv6 today, many more are supporting v6 in parts of their network.

Glen Ogden, regional sales director, Middle East, at A10 Networks says that IPv6 introduces not just another attack vector but an attack volume — one that encompasses a parallel universe of all DDoS attacks known today. All attack vectors that originate in IPv4, be they volumetric or application attacks, can also occur in IPv6.

For the most part, an IPv6 network is no more or less vulnerable to DDoS attacks than its IPv4 counterpart but the fact that any vulnerability in v4 can be exploited in v6 is frightening because of the sheer number of vectors and the fact that most security professionals don’t know everything running IPv6 in their network today.

IPv6-based DDoS attacks today are neither as prevalent nor as big as those happening over IPv4 but they are occurring with increasing frequency and sophistication. As IPv6 comes to represent an increasingly bigger part of the network each year, so too will exposure to IPv6-based attacks.

Volumetric attacks are perpetrated by leagues of zombie computing devices collectively known as a botnet. The power of DDoS volumetric attacks is proportional to the number of connected devices in the botnet.

Although only 6 percent of an organization’s website visitors use IPv6 today, it doesn’t mean only that percent will be affected.

As the number of connected devices grows, so too will IPv6. By 2020 it is estimated that there will be 34 billion connected devices on the Internet.

Attack vectors at layer 7 use specialized traffic designed to consume enough computational resources to overwhelm a system.

Most IPv6 attacks go unnoticed by the untrained eye. Mitigation of DDoS attacks over the next generation protocol starts with training.