India 2nd-largest source of HTTP DDoS attack traffic after China

NEW DELHI: As distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks grow exponentially globally, India was the second-largest source of HTTP DDoS attack traffic in July-September this year, after China which replaced the US as the main source of HTTP DDoS attack traffic in Q3, a report showed on Friday.

Attack traffic from China-registered IP addresses increased by 29 per cent (year-on-year) and 19 per cent (on-quarter).

"Following China was India as the second-largest source of HTTP DDoS attack traffic a" an increase of 61 per cent YoY. After India, the main sources were the US and Brazil," according to the report by digital infrastructure services provider Cloudflare.

The company saw some of the largest attacks on the internet, including a 2.5 Tbps DDoS attack in Q3. The attack was by a Mirai botnet variant aimed at a popular Minecraft server, Wynncraft, that didn't even notice the attack.

According to John Graham-Cumming, Cloudflare CTO, Russian-aligned groups are increasing attacks on targets outside of Ukraine.

"We saw attacks from the same group targeting multiple state websites last week as well. HTTP DDoS attacks have increased by 111 per cent compared to Q3 2021, and have become cheaper and more accessible to launch, which contributes to their continued growth and presence around the globe," he said in a statement.

Gaming/gambling was the most targeted industry, seeing a massive 381 per cent increase in Q3.

"Cloudflare's data centers saw attacks targeting Taiwanese companies increase nearly 20-fold, and when looking at the war in Ukraine, we can see that attacks on Russian websites surged 24 times compared to last year," the report said.

In Q3, Cloudflare's team automatically detected and mitigated multiple attacks that exceed 1 Tbps.

It saw a 114 per cent year-over-year increase in application-layer DDoS attacks targeting customers.

"Q3 saw ransom DDoS attacks increase for the third quarter in a row. September saw almost one out of every four respondents reported receiving a ransom DDoS attack or threat," the findings showed.