The number of DDoS attacks continues to increase. Since Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, DDoS attacks on German facilities such as airports or authorities have become increasingly common. In the first half of the year there were already over 8 million.
What began in 1974 with the first DDoS attack on the University of Illinois is now, according to NETSCOUT, almost 8 million attacks in the first half of 2023. DDoS attacks have now taken on a permanent place in everyday economic and social life and are increasingly being carried out with strategic sophistication - whether as part of modern warfare or to make ransom demands. Traditional defense mechanisms are hardly sufficient in this context.
Why are DDoS attacks increasingly occurring in everyday life?
Global events, but also the NATO applications of some European countries, have driven the recent increase in DDoS attacks. The life cycle of DDoS attack vectors shows the persistence of attackers in finding new attack methods and using them as weapons.
One development here is the execution of so-called adaptive DDoS attacks. Cybercriminals carry out extensive scans of the target networks before the actual DDoS attacks in order to identify vulnerable systems, adapt attack vectors and thus ensure the success of adaptive DDoS attacks.
This new attack technique, in which the effectiveness of attack vectors is monitored and changed depending on the defense situation, reinforces the need for dynamically adapting and efficient defense management.
Increased botnet attacks
Attackers are increasingly making use of botnets. According to NETSCOUT, when attacking government institutions, their use increased by 130% in the first half of 2023. Also noteworthy is the increase of almost 500% since 2019 in attacks at the HTTP/S application layer, and in DNS reflection/amplification attacks in the first half Growth of 2023% was observed in 17.
Due to the dynamic, cross-vector nature of modern DDoS attacks, best practice is to deploy both on-premises and a cloud solution with intelligent and automated integration that provides dynamically customizable DDoS protection. Not only in a geopolitical defense situation, but also when sensitive personal data is at stake, effective DDoS protection is a necessity.
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