Key observations on DDoS attacks in H1 2022

In the first half of 2022, the amount of DDoS attacks increased by 75.6% compared to the second half of 2021, according to new Nexusguard research revealed in the company’s DDoS Statistical Report for 1HY 2022.

In this Help Net Security video, Juniman Kasman, CTO at Nexusguard, talks about how, while the total number of attacks did grow, the average (0.59 Gbps) and maximum (232.0 Gbps) attack sizes each decreased by 56% and 66.8%, respectively, during the same period. Notably, application attacks increased a whopping 330% over the second half of 2021, and amplification attacks increased by 106.7%.

Single-vector attacks represented 85% of all attacks globally in H1 2022. UDP (User Datagram Protocol) attacks, which quickly overwhelm the target defenses, and HTTPS Flood, which exhaust servers with valid HTTPS requests, were the two most predominant vectors.

39.6% of attacks were UDP, an increase of 77.5% from H2 2021, and the two groups combined accounted for 55.5% of DDoS attacks globally. UDP attacks frequently serve as a smokescreen to mask other malicious activities such as efforts to compromise PII or the execution of malware or remote codes.