Highlights:
- In the third quarter, hackers particularly favored targeting casino and gambling enterprises out of all the industries they targeted.
- For the second straight quarter, Asia’s cryptocurrency industry saw the greatest threats geographically. For the fourth consecutive quarter, Europe’s top target remained the gaming and gambling business, continuing a constant trend.
Cloudflare Inc. released its quarterly distributed denial-of-service report, highlighted by another DDoS attack that set a new record for intensity.
The aforementioned record-breaking attack processed an astounding 201 million requests per second. The number is significantly higher than the greatest attack ever recorded, 71 million rps reported by Cloudflare in February.
The analysis from Cloudflare explores the broader dynamics of the changing cyber threat landscape in addition to that new attack. The company’s insights come from processing 64 million HTTP requests per second on average every day, which allows it to monitor and counteract over 140 billion cyber threats daily.
In the third quarter, hackers particularly favored targeting casino and gambling enterprises out of all the industries they attacked. According to the research, the fundamental reasons for the concentration range from the financial rewards connected to these sectors to the technological difficulties gaming and gambling face in fending off attacks.
Attack traffic also increased steadily during the period. The volume of HTTP DDoS attacks increased by 65% in the last quarter. The network and transport levels of the OSI model are the targets of Layer 3/4 DDoS attacks, which increased by 14% during the quarter. Rather than targeting apps directly, Layer 3/4 DDoS attacks aim to exhaust infrastructure resources such as network equipment’s bandwidth and processing capacity.
For the second straight quarter, Asia’s cryptocurrency industry saw the greatest threats geographically. For the fourth consecutive quarter, Europe’s top target remained the gaming and gambling business, continuing a constant trend. A startling fact about the attack landscape in Latin America is that over half of the attacks in the region were related to farming.
Retail businesses were the main target in the Middle East, while DDoS attacks against the software industry in North America surpassed the marketing and advertising sectors. Over half of all regional attacks in Oceania were directed towards the telecommunications sector, making it the most targeted industry.
The relief is that Cloudflare has risen to take on DDoS attacks head-on, even if their volume has only increased. Cloudflare systems automatically recognized most attacks, using emergency countermeasures to mitigate them.
According to the company, customers of Cloudflare’s content delivery network and web application firewall services who utilize HTTP reverse proxy are protected from powerful DDoS attacks. The report emphasizes the significance of using an automated, always-on HTTP DDoS Protection service for HTTP applications to defend against DDoS attacks for non-Cloudflare customers.