Conflict Drives A Significant Increase In DDoS Attacks

Uploaded on 2023-03-13 in NEWS-News Analysis, FREE TO VIEW

Of the many types of criminal activity that occur on the web, few are more difficult to prevent than Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and attackers are successful in the use of these techniques to frustrate and extort vulnerable targets.

These attacks can bring down even the largest websites by overloading servers with more requests than they can handle. Unable to meet the demand of junk requests, servers crash and often require hours to restore. For this reason, tracking DDoS trends is an important function of threat intelligence.

Now, data analysis carried out by NETSCOUT reveals a large increase in DDoS attacks and identifies is a significant link between geopolitical conflicts and these types of attacks.

Since 2021, DDoS attacks have trended upwards, both in volume and frequency. Layer 7 DDoS attacks of at least 500,000 requests per second (RPS) increased 81% in the past year. "By constantly innovating and adapting, attackers are designing new, more effective DDoS attack vectors or doubling down on existing effective methodologies," said Richard Hummel, threat intelligence lead, NETSCOUT.

In the first half of 2022, attackers conducted more pre-attack reconnaissance, exercised a new attack vector called TP240 PhoneHome, created a tsunami of TCP flooding attacks, and rapidly expanded high-powered botnets to plague network-connected resources. “In addition, bad actors have openly embraced online aggression with high-profile DDoS attack campaigns related to geopolitical unrest, which have had global implications." Hummel added

In addition to greater frequency, attack sizes were larger in 2022 than in 2021. The largest attack in 2022 was 4.5X larger than the biggest attack in 2021. In Q2 2022 alone, applications security firm Imperva detected and mitigated record-breaking DDoS attacks that were able to maintain extremely high rates over a period of several hours as opposed to only minutes.

A significant underlying aspect driving the increase is the geopolitical conflict impacting the dynamics of the online conflict in the war between the Ukraine and Russia.

According to NETSCOUT, since Russia invaded Ukraine over a year ago, cyber attacks have become a major part of Russia’s attack tactics. As Ukrainian Internet systems relocate to other countries to ensure connectivity, threat actors followed them, launching DDoS attacks against the nations offering support to the besieged nation. The war has resulted in 66% of businesses changing their cyber security strategies, and 82% of security professionals today believe that geopolitics and cyber security are intrinsically linked, as reported on by securitybrief.com.

In evidence, after Ireland welcomed numerous Ukrainian refugees last year, there was a 200% increase in attacks against organisations in the country. Similarly, as tensions have increased between Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong in 2022, DDoS attacks against Taiwan have occurred with increasing frequency.

NETSCOUT: F5 Labs: I-HLS: Imperva: Imperva: Comparitech:

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