SECURITY NEWS
F5 Labs report finds DDoS attacks rose 112 % YoY in 2023
New research from F5 Labs has found that DDoS , Distributed denial of service attacks came back with a vengeance last year after several years of decline . F5 Labs ’ 2024 DDoS Attack Trends report recorded 2,127 attacks in 2023 , which is a 112 % rise compared to 1,003 in 2022 .
Analysis of incidents recorded via the F5 Distributed Cloud platform , combined with insights from F5 ’ s Security Incident Response and Threat Analytics and Reporting teams , also showed that organisations faced an average of 11 attacks in 2023 . The most targeted organisation was subject to 187 separate attacks during the year , including the largest single attack recorded by F5 Labs .
“ Through a combination of geopolitical unrest , trivially exploited vulnerabilities , and the emergence of new botnets , denial of service incidents have exploded since our 2023 DDoS Attack Trends report in February 2023 ,” said David Warburton , Director of F5 Labs .
According to F5 Labs ’ analysis , attack sizes remained high throughout 2023 , staying consistently above 100Gbps , and many over 500Gbps . February was the outlier with the biggest attack of that month reaching less than 10Gbps .
The biggest target was telecommunications , with companies in the industry being hit by a 655 % increase in attacks last year .
The early months of 2023 were defined by a major law enforcement operation undertaken by Europol and international partners in December 2022 . They intervened to shut down servers responsible for much DDoS activity , including one that had facilitated 30 million attacks . The impact of this was substantial but short-lived .
After a notably quiet February , by March we observed the largest recorded attack of the year , and over the course of 2023 we saw DDoS attacks bounce back to higher levels of activity than before .
The sharp rise in DDoS activity hit certain industries particularly hard in 2023 . Software and computer services remained the most targeted and experienced more than twice the number of attacks in 2023 as the previous year . The sector was the target of 37 % of all attacks , although they were relatively small in size , peaking with a 200Gbps attack in November .
The biggest target was telecommunications , with companies in the industry being hit by a 655 % increase in attacks last year , accounting for almost a quarter , 23 % of all DDoS attacks recorded by F5 Labs in 2023 .
The third-most targeted sector was support services , which accounted for 11 % of total attacks . This sector was also subject to the largest recorded attack , which occurred in March and measured 1Tbps . In this instance , threat actors attempted to take down the affected organisation with a deluge of TCP SYN packets .
Media was another sector to experience a notable upsurge in attacks , highlighting DDoS ’ shifting geopolitical dimensions . In a year where global tensions and conflict were rarely out of the headlines , F5 Labs recorded a 250 % increase in denial of service attacks .
Six nations – United States , France , Saudi Arabia , Italy , Belgium and United Kingdom – were subjected to 80 % of all DDoS attacks last year . The US alone made up 38 % of the total , with its organisations experiencing more than double the number of incidents as those in France , the secondmost affected country . •
David Warburton , Director F5 Labs
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