Ukraine, Gaza Wars Inspire DDoS Surge Against Finservs

Financial services organizations have faced nearly twice as many distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks this year as any other industry, thanks in part to a rise in hacktivism.

According to a new report from Akamai, between Jan. 1 and June 30, there were nearly 3,000 Layer 3 and 4 DDoS attack events in the financial services sector (Layer 3 and 4 attacks occur at the network and transport layers of Internet communication). The next most-targeted industries — gaming, then high tech, then manufacturing — suffered around 1,000 to 1,500 events each.

A number of factors contribute to the sheer scale of the threat, experts say, including a general rise in DDoS across the board, a surge in hacktivist activity in association with high-profile geopolitical conflicts, emerging threats to application programming interfaces (APIs), and more.

And at the end of the day, it's just easy. "They don't have to find a vulnerability. They don't have to find that gap in your armor. They can just literally sit there and hit a button," says Richard Hummel, director of threat intelligence for Netscout.

Hacktivism Drives DDoS

On July 15, beginning at 10:05 a.m. local time, the full weight of a globally distributed botnet was turned against a major financial services company in Israel.

Related:Identifying and Mitigating DDoS Attacks

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