Attackers intensify DDoS attacks with new tactics

As we entered 2023, the cybersecurity landscape witnessed an increase in sophisticated, high-volume attacks, according to Gcore.

The maximum attack power rose from 600 to 800 Gbps. UDP flood attacks were most common and amounted to 52% of total attacks, while SYN flood accounted for 24%. In third place was TCP flood.

The most-attacked business sectors are gaming, telecom, and financial. The longest attack duration in Q2/Q3 was seven days, 16 hours, and 22 minutes. Most attacks lasted less than four hours.

The increase in the DDoS attack volume in the H1 of 2023

There has been a significant increase in the power and volume of DDoS attacks over the last two years:

• In 2021, the capacity of DDoS attacks was up to 300 Gbps.
• In 2022, the attack capacity was about 650 Gbps.
• In the H1 of 2023, we see a capacity of about 800 Gbps.

The alarming 50–100% annual increase in DDoS attack volume highlights the growing sophistication of cyber attackers and their utilization of increasingly powerful tools.

This means that businesses need to invest in DDoS mitigation strategies and solutions to protect their networks, systems, and customer data. Failure to address these evolving threats can result in costly disruptions, reputational damage, loss of customer trust, and security breaches.

Attackers are employing adaptive strategies

According to Gcore’s statistics, in the H1 of 2023:

• UDP flood became more popular among attackers and is the most common method.
• SYN flood is in second place.
• In third place is TCP flood.
• All other techniques combined accounted for just 5% of attack types.

According to Andrey Slastenov, Head of Security Department at Gcore: “There has been an increase in the frequency of complex, multi-vector attacks. Attackers are now employing adaptive strategies, such as combining high-volume UDP attacks with a massive number of TCP packets, and shifting from targeting the application layer with a large amount of traffic to using a high volume of small packets. These changes in tactics indicate a deliberate effort to intensify the DDoS assault by overwhelming the network infrastructure and potentially bypassing mitigation measures. The ultimate goal is to maximize the impact of the attack and disrupt services.”

DDoS attacks across different business sectors have revealed specific trends and impacts. According to Gcore’s report, gaming, telecom, and financial industries were the most attacked sectors in the H1 of 2023.