A recent Gcore report reveals an increase of 46% in the number of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks compared to the same period in 2023. UDP floods made up 61% of DDoS attacks, while TCP floods and SYN floods constituted 18% and 11% of the total respectively.
The most-attacked business sectors were gaming (49%), technology (15%), financial services (12%) and telecommunications (10%). The e-commerce (7%) and media and entertainment (5%) industries emerged from the 'Other' category in H1 2024, indicating that they were being targeted more often than in the past.
Attacks on the gaming industry in H1 2024 continued to dominate and rose by 3% over H2 2023. The report saw DDoS attacks being used by gamers and gaming groups as a tactic against opponents to derive competitive advantage in tournaments and matches. However, the biggest change over the previous two quarters was in the number of attacks on the technology industry, which more than doubled to 15%. The sector has become increasingly attractive for bad actors seeking to disrupt businesses that host critical infrastructure.
In terms of the industries most impacted by network-layer attacks in H1 2024, gaming was first at 47%, technology came in second with 31% of the attacks, and the telecommunications sector was third most-affected wit1 industries affected by application-layer attacks, financial services were highly targeted with 41% of all attacks. E-commerce was the second most-affected sector with 28% of application-layer attacks, with media and entertainment third with 13% of the total application-layer attacks.
The vast majority of attacks lasted under ten minutes, while the maximum attack duration recorded during H1 2024 lasted for 16 hours. The potency of even the shortest attacks, however, was strong, which would often have led users to abandon the services they were trying to access with a significant impact on the brand reputation of the provider.
