Increased DDoS Attacks in 2024 Rising Threats and Impact on Industries

TapTechNews August 15th news, the network security company Gcore released a blog post yesterday (August 14th), reporting that the number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack events in the first half of 2024 was 445,000, an increase of 46% year-on-year and 34% quarter-on-quarter.

Attack power continues to rise

In terms of attack power, the most powerful attack in the first half of 2024 reached 1.7 Tbps, slightly higher than 1.6 Tbps in 2023. Although this 0.1 Tbps increase seems small, it indicates a continuous upward trend in the scale of potential threats.

TapTechNews note: Tbps is trillion bits per second, which is the largest unit in the current data transmission field. 1 Tbps is equivalent to simultaneously transmitting more than 212,000 high-definition video streams.

Gcore's head of security, Andrey Slastenov, explains:

We should not be deceived by only a 0.1 Tbps increase in the first half of this year, because an attack of only 300 Gbps can bring an unprotected server offline within a few seconds.

Any payload of an attack calculated in terabits per second is huge, and any increase in attack effectiveness, no matter how small, will have a serious impact at these levels.

Emerging industries hit hard by DDoS attacks

The gaming and gambling industries remain the hardest hit by DDoS attacks, accounting for 49% of the total number of events in the first half of 2024. The high risk and competitiveness of online games make them particularly vulnerable to such disruptions.

The technology industry has seen a significant increase in attacks, doubling the proportion to 15%. Technology providers offer key services such as servers, storage, and network resources, which are crucial to the operation of many industries. Therefore, the disruption of this industry will have a far-reaching impact.

Financial services (12%), telecommunications (10%), and e-commerce (7%) also face a large number of attacks. These industries are all lucrative attack targets because they rely on uninterrupted services and real-time data processing.