Driven by tech-savvy and politically motivated hacktivist groups and an increase in DNS water torture attacks, NETSCOUT observed more than 7 million distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in the second half of 2023, representing a 15% increase from the first half.
“Global adversaries have become more sophisticated in the past year attacking websites and overloading servers to lockout customers and inflict digital chaos to influence geopolitical issues,” says Richard Hummel, senior threat intelligence lead, NETSCOUT. “The relentless barrage of DDoS threats drives up costs and creates security fatigue for network operators. They cannot safeguard their digital assets without the proper advanced DDoS protection leveraging predictive, real-time threat intelligence.”
Key takeaways:
- NETSCOUT collected, analyzed, prioritized and disseminated data on DDoS attacks from 214 countries and territories, 456 vertical industries, and more than 13,000 autonomous system numbers (ASNs).
- Groups like NoName057(016) and Anonymous Sudan, as well as lone hackers and small collectives, are increasingly using DDoS to target those ideologically opposed to them. For example, Peru experienced a 30% increase in attacks tied to protests of former Peruvian President Fujimori’s release from prison on Dec. 6, 2023. Poland experienced a surge in attacks at the end of 2023 associated with a regime change and statements reaffirming Poland’s support of Ukraine in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. And, anonymous Sudan attacked X (formerly Twitter) to influence Elon Musk regarding Starlink service in Sudan, and it attacked Telegram for suspending its main channel.
- NoName057(016), Anonymous Sudan, and Killnet have taken credit for DDoS attacks in Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and Palestine targeting communications infrastructure, hospitals, and banks. Daily attacks from hacktivists increased more than ten-fold between the first and second halves of 2023. NoName057(016) topped the list of DDoS adversaries in 2023, targeting 780 websites across 35 countries.
- In addition, based on NETSCOUT’s observations of the DDoS threat landscape, approximately 1% of DDoS attacks are suppressed from originating networks.
