The newly released report indicates that the first quarter of 2012 (Q1 2012) was characterised by extremely high volumes of malicious traffic directed at Prolexic's financial services clients.

Compared to Q1 2011, the first quarter of 2012 experienced a 25 percent increase in total number of DDoS attacks; 25 percent increase in Layer 7 (application layer) attacks; and shorter attack duration: 28.5 hours versus 65 hours.

The Prolexic Security Engineering & Response Team (PLXsert) team also mitigated more attack traffic this quarter than it did in all of 2011.

"We expect other verticals beyond financial services, gaming and gambling to be on the receiving end of these massive attack volumes as the year progresses," said Neal Quinn, Prolexic's vice president of operations.