Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are increasingly being accompanied by huge demands against their marks, according to an annual survey from Cloudflare.
Ransom-motivated DDoS attacks increased 29% year-on-year and 175% between Q3 2021 and Q4 2021, according to the research on cyberattack trends showing that companies must do more to prevent DDoS attack vectors.
The manufacturing industry was the most targeted vector in Q4 of 2021 by application-layer DDoS attacks, racking up a concerning seven-fold (641%) increase in the number of attacks. The business services and gaming & gambling industries were the second and third most targeted industries by DDoS attacks.
Michael Isbitski, technical evangelist at Salt Security said in an email to IT Security Guru that it regularly identifies and mitigates flaws in APIs that can result in denial of service (DoS) or distributed denial of service (DDoS) conditions if attackers find and abuse them. He added: “Application-layer or layer 7 (L7) DoS conditions are common in application designs where application functionality, often initiated API calls, may be too “heavy” in terms of the data served to clients in responses or computing resources functionality will consume. The API calls or application functions generate excessive load that in turn creates availability problems for end users.”
In terms of DDoS techniques, Isbitski noted that: “There are numerous forms of DoS/DDoS and techniques that attackers use to distribute, reflect, and amplify requests to impact systems availability. The report calls out traditional network DoS/DDoS attacks like SYN floods or those attacks that target specific protocols like UDP or SMTP. Enterprise web applications typically communicate using HTTP. Attackers aiming to perform DoS/DDoS against enterprise applications usually focus less on abusing the HTTP protocol itself and instead zone in on functionality coded into the application and APIs. The ways attackers can abuse applications and APIs varies depending on what functionality is exposed and how business logic is coded, which also complicates detection and mitigation. The
added geo-graphic distribution and amplification that’s inherent with DDoS greatly exacerbates availability problems and can quickly bring applications or systems to a halt if not mitigated promptly.”
He also stressed that these types of flaws are present in all vertical sectors, but that potential business impacts vary based on the product or service offerings of the impacted organisation. “Cloudflare noted that it sees manufacturing being heavily targeted, and successful DoS and DDoS attempts by attackers can
result in physical supply chain impacts. Salt Labs has documented a few examples of API flaws that can lead to DoS/DDoS in its published threat reports, many of which were observed in financial services and financial technology platforms,” Isbitski concluded.
