In the first quarter of 2022, the number of extortionate DDoS attacks decreased by 52% compared to the last quarter of 2021. According to the latest statistics from Cloudflare, only 17% of its customers affected by DDoS attacks reported extortion in January, 6% in February and only 3% in March.
Cloudflare specialists also reported a colossal increase in DDoS attacks at the application level by 164% year-on-year. The most notable trends in this category are an increase of 5086% compared to the previous quarter in the number of DDoS attacks at the application level against the consumer electronics industry and an increase of 2131% compared to the previous quarter against Internet media.
Another new trend of concern is the reflection-amplification method, which is already actively used by criminals. Reflection attacks start with a small packet reflected inside a closed network, and its size increases with each “bounce”. When the possible upper limit is reached, the resulting huge volume of traffic is directed to the target.
Cloudflare reported a sharp increase in volume DDoS attacks – the number of attacks with a speed of more than 100 Gbps increased by 645% compared to the previous quarter, and attacks with a speed of more than 10 million packets per second — by more than 300% compared to the previous quarter.