The first quarter of 2022 was hugely shaped by the geopolitical conflict between Russia and Ukraine. A sizable part of the quarter was influenced by DDoS attacks. Ukraine, particularly, was affected by a large number of cyberattacks, including a lot of DDoS attacks. Kaspersky, in its latest DDoS attacks report, stated that these attacks hit an all-time high in the first quarter of the year. 

Some stats your way

  • The firm detected 91,052 DDoS attacks in Q1 2022. 
  • There has been a 46% rise in the number of attacks.
  • The U.S. accounted for the most number of targets at 45.01%, followed by China (9.34%) and Germany (4.95%). 
  • Around 55% of C2 servers were located in the U.S. 
  • The largest number of attacks—16.35%—were launched on Sundays.
  • While most attacks (94.95%) lasted for an average of 4 hours, the longest continued for 23 days or 549 hours. 
  • More than half (53.64%) of DDoS attacks were UDP flooding, followed by SYN flooding (22.37%) and TCP flooding (20.17%). 

Some attack instances

  • The major reason behind the phenomenal rise of DDoS attacks is the Ukraine crisis, stated Kaspersky researchers. Earlier this month, threat actors targeted WordPress sites to conduct DDoS attacks on Ukrainian websites.  
  • Starting February 24, Russian websites were bombarded with attacks. The responsibility was mostly claimed by the Anonymous collective.  
  • In March, a hacker attempted to launch terabytes of DDoS traffic by using a single packet. The attack abused the CVE-2022-26143 and was aimed at financial institutions, ISPs, and logistics businesses. 

Comcast report findings

  • The report finds that 2021 was a record year for DDoS attacks as the firm identified around 25,000 multi-vector attacks affecting layers 3,4, and 7.
  • Sixty-nine percent of customers reported facing a DDoS attack, of which 55% were targets of multi-vector attacks.
  • The attackers were persistent and spared no industry vertical. However, the education and healthcare sectors remain favorites.
  • Vulnerabilities that surfaced due to the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in 73% of multi-vector attacks targeted at finance, education, healthcare, and government sectors. 

The bottom line

Threat actors are evolving and innovating relentlessly and organizations should stay vigilant. The link between data breaches and DDoS attacks is quite strong, something that attackers undoubtedly capitalize on. Proactive cyber defenses are the need of the hour since there may not be enough time to set them up once an attack hits you. Experts do not predict a downward curve in DDoS attacks and therefore, it is recommended to implement reliable anti-DDoS measures.

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