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Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are spiking sharply in Australia and around the globe, according to cloud and network security company Cloudflare.
According to the company’s Q3 2023 DDoS Threat Report, there has been a sharp leap in the number of threats it faced on a daily basis, increasing 20 per cent quarter on quarter to 350 million.
Cloudflare said that in Q3, it witnessed one of the “most sophisticated and persistent DDoS attack campaigns in recorded history”, adding that the campaign was part of an overall 65 per cent increase in HTTP DDoS attack traffic for the quarter.
Gaming and gambling companies bore the mass of these attacks, taking the top spots for most attacked industries and overtaking the cryptocurrency industry.
“We see a lot of DDoS attacks of all types and sizes, and our network is one of the largest in the world, spanning more than 300 cities in over 100 countries,” said Cloudflare.
“Through this network, we serve over 64 million HTTP requests per second at peak and about 2.3 billion DNS queries every day.”
Cloudflare added that it mitigates an average of 140 billion cyber threats per day.
The company continued, saying that while Australia hasn’t faced any high-profile attacks, the number of attacks it was required to mitigate was significant.
While only seeing a 7 per cent increase in internet traffic quarter to quarter, Cloudflare observed that Australia received 48 billion daily content requests. Of that, 1.2 billion were mitigated each day by Cloudflare, which classified them as originating from Australia.
“Even though Australia hasn’t had any high-profile attacks recently, this quarter, there was still a significant increase when it came to daily cyber threats as Cloudflare had to block an additional 20 per cent of threats in Australia QoQ, at an average of 350 million a day,” said Cloudflare.
The company added that 79 cases saw AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules used as a main form of security, followed by DDoS mitigation.
Attacks on Israeli websites have also increased substantially since Hamas fired thousands of rockets at the country on 7 October.
“Approximately 12 minutes [after the missiles], Cloudflare systems automatically detected and mitigated DDoS attacks that targeted websites that provide critical information and alerts to civilians on rocket attacks,” said Cloudflare.
“The initial attack peaked at 100k requests per second (rps) and lasted 10 minutes. Forty-five minutes later, a second much larger attack struck and peaked at 1M rps. It lasted six minutes. Additional smaller DDoS attacks continued hitting the websites in the next hours.”
The full Cloudflare DDoS Threat Report for Q3 2023 can be found on the company website.
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