Q2’23 saw an increase in deliberately engineered and targeted DNS attacks alongside a 532% surge in DDoS attacks exploiting the Mitel vulnerability (CVE-2022-26143).
At the same time, attacks targeting Cryptocurrency companies increased by 600%, as a broader 15% increase in HTTP DDoS attacks was observed. Of these, there is a noticable escalation in attack sophistication. After Crypto, Gaming and Gambling websites came in second place as their attack share increased by 19% QoQ. Marketing and Advertising websites not far behind in third place with little change in their share of attacks.
Over the past quarter, HTTP DDoS attacks increased by 15% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) despite a 35% decrease year-over-year (YoY). Additionally, network-layer DDoS attacks decreased this quarter by approximately 14%.
Over the past quarter, the most common attack vector was DNS-based DDoS attacks — 32% of all DDoS attacks were over the DNS protocol. Amongst these, one of the more concerning attack types we’ve seen increasing is the DNS Laundering attack which can pose severe challenges to organizations that operate their own authoritative DNS servers.
Over the past months, an average of 67.7 million cyber attacks targeted Non-profits on a daily basis. Additionally, one of the largest attacks has been observed this quarter is an ACK flood DDoS attack which originated from a Mirai-variant botnet comprising approximately 11K IP addresses.
Despite general figures indicating an increase in overall attack durations, most of the attacks are short-lived and so was this one. This attack lasted only two minutes. However, more broadly, those attacks exceeding 3 hours have increased by 103% QoQ.
For the past two quarters, the Gaming and Gambling industry was the most targeted industry in Asia. In Q2, however, the Gaming and Gambling industry dropped to second place and Cryptocurrency took the lead as the most attacked industry (~50%). Substantial portions of the attack traffic originated from Asia itself (30%) and North America (30%). This report comes to us from Cloudflare.
