More than one in four (28 percent) of cyber security professionals in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region think that DDoS attacks are the most impactful threat vector of 2023, Cyber Security Hub research has found.
In a survey conducted by Cyber Security Hub, cyber security professionals were asked which threat vectors they believe will have the biggest impact on cyber security in 2023. For those who are based in the APAC region, 28 percent said DDoS attacks would have the biggest impact.
Other threat vectors noted as particularly dangerous also in the region included malicious code commits and key employee/role targeting, which 27 and 24 percent of respondents said would have the biggest impact, respectively.
What are DDoS attacks?
Distributed denial of service attacks, or DDoS attacks, see malicious actors attempt to disrupt a site by overwhelming its infrastructure with a large amount of internet traffic. As DDoS attacks overwhelm a site’s bandwidth, users are prevented from accessing it.
DDoS attacks can be launched for a number of reasons, but are primarily used to cause disruption by taking down key sites for a prolonged period of time. The disruptive nature of DDoS attacks means they are used by malicious actors as a way of directly targeting specific individuals or companies.
For example, malicious actors could launch a DDoS attacks against online content creators to prevent them from creating or uploading content. Alternatively, wide-scale DDoS attacks against companies or organizations have been launched by hackers motivated by their political views. These malicious actors are known as hacktivists.
DDoS attacks can also be used to cause monetary harm to companies as they will be unable to function properly if their website is down.
Record DDoS attack launched in APAC
On February 23, 2023, a record DDoS attack was seen within the Asia-Pacific region. At its peak, the attack traffic was at 900.1GB per second.
The attack was registered and mitigated by cyber security company Akami, whose primary business is content delivery networks (CDNs), who noted that the attack was launched against one of its customers within APAC. The attack itself was described as “intense and short-lived" with the 900.1GB peak lasting just a minute and the entire attack lasting just under five minutes.
To mitigate the attack, Akami distributed the attack’s traffic across its scrubbing center, which allowed the traffic to be analyzed and any malicious traffic to be removed. This meant that none of Akami’s 26 scrubbing centers saw more than 12 percent of the 900.01GB of traffic at any time, allowing business processes to continue.
Due to the proactive nature of Akami’s threat defense strategy, there was no collateral damage caused by the DDoS attack.