Bengaluru, Jan 23 (IANS): There has been a 17 per cent decrease in the Distribution Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in the third quarter of 2017 as compared to the second quarter, a new report said on Tuesday.

Verisign, a global leader in domain names and Internet security, saw a 70 per cent decrease in the peak size of the average attack.

"Attackers continue to launch repeated attacks against their targets. In fact, Verisign observed that 45 per cent of customers who experienced DDoS attacks in Q3 2017 were targeted multiple times during the quarter," the company said in a statement.

A DDoS is a type of DOS attack where multiple compromised systems, which are often infected with a Trojan, are used to target a single system causing a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

"DDoS attacks remain unpredictable and vary widely in terms of speed and complexity," it added.

Eighty-eight percent of DDoS attacks mitigated by Verisign in the third quarter employed multiple attack types.

Verisign observed attacks targeting networks at multiple layers and attack types that changed over the course of a DDoS event.

The largest volumetric DDoS attack observed was a multi-vector attack that peaked at approximately 2.5 Gbps and around 1 Mpps for one hour, the company said.