Cloudflare has released its Q2 2024 DDoS Threat Report on global attack trends. Notable findings include a significant increase in DDoS attacks, as well as details on the most attacked regions and industries.
Highlights include:
- Cloudflare recorded a 20% increase in DDoS attacks compared to the same quarter in 2023. Cloudflare’s systems automatically detected and mitigated 4 million DDoS attacks; approximately 1,831 DDoS attacks every hour.
- The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) jumped to the most attacked region as it hosted Julian Assange’s trial. Over 78% of CNMI-bound traffic was automatically detected and mitigated as HTTP DDoS attack traffic by Cloudflare.
- Leading up to the 54th General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) which took place in late June in Paraguay, Cloudflare registered a 200% increase in network-layer DDoS attack traffic in our Asunción data centers. Over 70% of the traffic ingested there was malicious.
Key takeaways
The majority of DDoS attacks are small and quick. However, even these attacks can disrupt online services that do not follow best practices for DDoS defense.
Furthermore, threat actor sophistication is increasing, perhaps due to the availability of Generative AI and developer copilot tools, resulting in attack code that delivers DDoS attacks that are harder to defend against. Even prior to the rise in attack sophistication, many organizations struggled to defend against these threats on their own. But they don’t need to. Cloudflare is here to help. We invest significant resources – so you don’t have to – to ensure our automated defenses, along with the entire portfolio of Cloudflare security products, to protect against existing and emerging threats.