The European cybersecurity agency has warned that geopolitics is fueling a current rise in denial of service (DoS) attacks.
ENISA analyzed 310 publicly reported DoS attacks between January 2022 and August 2023, to compile its ENISA Threat Landscape for DoS Attacks report.
He says two-thirds (66%) were motivated by political reasons or activist agendas, with half (50%) due to the war in Ukraine.
As a result, the most affected sector during the period was “government administration”, accounting for 46% of attacks.
The report found that in 57% of cases, attacks caused “total disruption” to the victim organization, with users experiencing “severe outages” for the duration of the attack.
Learn more about DDoS attacks: HTTP/S DDoS attacks increased 487% in three years
“Partial disruptions were observed in 21% of incidents, reportedly experiencing intermittent outages or severe service degradation” the report claimed. “Only in 4% of cases did the attacks cause what was termed zero disruption, in which the attack itself was ineffective or the target’s DoS protection in place meant there was no impact noticeable on the target. »
This suggests that DDoS attack mitigation measures still have a way to go.
In October, Google and others revealed a new zero-day “fast reset” vulnerability that malicious actors were exploiting to launch the largest DDoS attacks on record, from relatively small botnets.
Google said its exploitation allowed malicious actors to launch a series of DDoS attacks that reached a peak of 398 million requests per second (rps). The previous largest was Rp46 million.