There has been a surge in DDoS attacks both in volume and frequency in 2022, researchers said while shedding light on the attack trend.

Largest DDoS attack reaches a record high

The Imperva DDoS Threat Landscape Report mentioned that there was an average of four large-volume DDoS attacks per month, leading to an 81% increase in such attacks from 2021.
  • The largest of these attacks was 4.5x times more than the biggest attack recorded in 2021. 
  • While the average RPF of large-volume attacks in 2021 was estimated to be at 1 million, it rose to 1.45 million in 2022. 

Impacted sectors

The report highlighted that large-volume DDoS attacks were more widespread in 2022.
  • Organizations in the automotive, IT, and telecommunications sectors suffered the highest number of attacks. This was followed by organizations in the financial, government, and education sectors. 
  • The rise in geopolitical conflict also led to an increase in hacktivism-based DDoS attacks owing to the Russia-Ukraine conflict that began in Feb this year.
  • As a result, Ukraine experienced nearly a 660% spike in attacks.

Worth noting

Large-volume DDoS attacks are created by building an army of botnets with thousands of infected devices. Some new botnet attacks were observed recently.
  • The attack scope of ZeroBot was expanded with new exploits and DDoS methods to target more devices. 
  • A newly found GoTrim botnet also attempted to gain control of systems by performing brute force attacks. 
  • The capabilities of the Fodcha botnet were also enhanced by adding an extortion feature to its arsenal, thus demanding a ransom from victims in return to stop attacks.

The bottomline

Given the rise in the volume of frequency of DDoS attacks, it is expected that the trend will continue in 2023. Therefore, it’s important to have a solid security posture to keep your digital assets secure.
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