Ukraine war adds severity of denial of service attacks

Arabian Post Staff

The Russia-Ukraine war and NATO bids have driven recent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks growth, according to the findings of 1H2023 DDoS Threat Intelligence Report by Netscout Systems. Cybercriminals launched approximately 7.9 million DDoS attacks in the first half of 2023, representing a 31% year-over-year increase.

Finland was targeted by pro-Russian hacktivists in 2022 during its bid to join NATO. Turkey and Hungary were targeted with DDoS attacks for opposing Finland’s bid. In 2023, Sweden experienced a similar onslaught around its NATO bid, culminating with a 500 Gbps DDoS attack in May. Overall, ideologically motivated DDoS attacks have targeted the United States, Ukraine, Finland, Sweden, Russia, and multiple other countries.

During 2H2022, Netscout documented a trend in DDoS attacks against wireless telecommunications providers that incurred a 79% increase globally. That trend continued among APAC wireless providers in 1H2023 with a 294% increase, which correlates to many broadband gaming users shifting their activity to 5G fixed wireless access as providers roll out their networks.

Netscout’s insights into the threat landscape come from its ATLAS sensor network built over decades of working with hundreds of Internet Service Providers globally, gleaning trends from an average of 424 Tbps of internet peering traffic, an increase of 5.7% over 2022. The company has observed nearly 500% growth in HTTP/S application layer attacks since 2019 and 17% growth in DNS reflection/amplification volumes during the first half of 2023.

Other key findings from the report include:

Also published on Medium.