The Finnish parliament’s website and the Technical Research Centre of Finland were the targets of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on Tuesday, the day Finland joined NATO.
A pro-Russia hacker group known as NoName057(16) claimed responsibility for the attacks. The same group was also behind an attack on Ukraine, the US, Poland, and other European countries.
Israel also experienced cyberattacks this week on universities and medical centres, as well as the security firm Check Point, which were attributed to the pro-Russia hacktivist group Killnet.
Application performance management firm NetScout has reported a massive increase in DDoS attacks worldwide, driven by exploits against websites by Killnet and other groups. In the last six months of 2022, there was a 487% increase in HTTP/HTTPS application-layer DDoS attacks since 2019, with Killnet being responsible for many of these.
These attacks disrupt the functioning of web servers and protocols, making it impossible for a site to deliver content. Richard Hummel, threat intelligence lead of NetScout, has called for organisations to adapt to the dynamic nature of the DDoS threat landscape.
NetScout’s ATLAS sensor network, which collects DDoS attack statistics from an average of 93 countries daily, has found that DDoS attacks have grown more sophisticated and complex, with multi-terabit-per-second attacks becoming commonplace.
The firm says that direct-path attacks and traditional reflection/amplification attacks have increased by 18% over the past three years. The telecommunications industry has experienced a 79% growth in DDoS attacks since 2020 because of the rollout of 5G networks to the home.
Carpet-bombing attacks, which simultaneously target entire IP address ranges, increased by 110% from the first to the second half of 2022, with most attacks against internet service provider networks. DNS query flood attacks have more than tripled since 2019, with the average daily attack count for 2022 being approximately 850 attacks, a 67% increase from 2021.
