Financial services sees sharp increase in DDoS attacks as geopolitical tensions rise

Dive Brief:

Distributed denial of service attacks against the financial services industry surged in 2023, making it the most frequently targeted sector, according to a report released Wednesday from FS-ISAC and Akamai.
Attacks against the sector rose 154% year-over-year, driven largely by the rise of cyber hacktivist groups and increasingly powerful botnets.
Financial services accounted for about 35% of all DDoS attacks, surpassing the gaming industry, which previously led all sectors.

Dive Insight:

DDoS attacks against the financial services sector historically accounted for about 10-15% of all attacks, however that trend began to rise in 2021, the FS-ISAC and Akamai found.

“Financial services companies are prime targets because successfully disrupting operations, for even just a moment, can lead to severe reputational risks and distrust in the global financial system,” Teresa Walsh, chief intelligence officer and managing director, EMEA, at FS-ISAC, said via email.

Akamai in September said it prevented a DDoS attack on a major U.S. financial institution. The attack peaked at 633.7 gigabits per second and 55 million packets per second.

The increased activity was driven in large part by hacktivist groups using DDoS as a tool to disrupt institutions at a time of rising geopolitical tensions, beginning with the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022 and later the Israel-Hamas war October, the report found.

These hacktivist groups often favor DDoS attacks due to the “conspicuous nature of the resulting impacts,” said Conor McLaren, principal adversary hunter at Dragos.

“Specifically, while these attacks are often unsophisticated, they can draw significant attention to geopolitical and social causes, which can have a cascading effect on the proliferation of fear and uncertainty," McLaren said via email.

U.S. authorities in July warned that threat groups were potentially targeting multiple sectors using DDoS capabilities, including one group which claimed to have targeted the Treasury Department’s Electronic Federal Tax Payment System. By October, security researchers warned a novel zero day vulnerability, known as HTTP/2 Rapid Reset, was being used to launch some of the most powerful DDoS attacks ever recorded.