All posts by João Tomé

From .com to .beauty: The evolving threat landscape of unwanted email

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/top-level-domains-email-phishing-threats


You’re browsing your inbox and spot an email that looks like it’s from a brand you trust. Yet, something feels off. This might be a phishing attempt, a common tactic where cybercriminals impersonate reputable entities — we’ve written about the top 50 most impersonated brands used in phishing attacks. One factor that can be used to help evaluate the email’s legitimacy is its Top-Level Domain (TLD) — the part of the email address that comes after the dot.

In this analysis, we focus on the TLDs responsible for a significant share of malicious or spam emails since January 2023. For the purposes of this blog post, we are considering malicious email messages to be equivalent to phishing attempts. With an average of 9% of 2023’s emails processed by Cloudflare’s Cloud Email Security service marked as spam and 3% as malicious, rising to 4% by year-end, we aim to identify trends and signal which TLDs have become more dubious over time. Keep in mind that our measurements represent where we observe data across the email delivery flow. In some cases, we may be observing after initial filtering has taken place, at a point where missed classifications are likely to cause more damage. This information derived from this analysis could serve as a guide for Internet users, corporations, and geeks like us, searching for clues, as Internet detectives, in identifying potential threats. To make this data readily accessible, Cloudflare Radar, our tool for Internet insights, now includes a new section dedicated to email security trends.

Cyber attacks often leverage the guise of authenticity, a tactic Cloudflare thwarted following a phishing scheme similar to the one that compromised Twilio in 2022. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) notes that 90% of cyber attacks start with phishing, and fabricating trust is a key component of successful malicious attacks. We see there are two forms of authenticity that attackers can choose to leverage when crafting phishing messages, visual and organizational. Attacks that leverage visual authenticity rely on attackers using branding elements, like logos or images, to build credibility. Organizationally authentic campaigns rely on attackers using previously established relationships and business dynamics to establish trust and be successful.

Our findings from 2023 reveal that recently introduced generic TLDs (gTLDs), including several linked to the beauty industry, are predominantly used both for spam and malicious attacks. These TLDs, such as .uno, .sbs, and .beauty, all introduced since 2014, have seen over 95% of their emails flagged as spam or malicious. Also, it’s important to note that in terms of volume, “.com” accounts for 67% of all spam and malicious emails (more on that below).

TLDs

2023 Spam %

2023 Malicious %

2023 Spam + malicious %

TLD creation

.uno

62%

37%

99%

2014

.sbs

64%

35%

98%

2021

.best

68%

29%

97%

2014

.beauty

77%

20%

97%

2021

.top

74%

23%

97%

2014

.hair

78%

18%

97%

2021

.monster

80%

17%

96%

2019

.cyou

34%

62%

96%

2020

.wiki

69%

26%

95%

2014

.makeup

32%

63%

95%

2021

Email and Top-Level Domains history

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email over ARPANET, using the @ character in the address. Five decades later, email remains relevant but also a key entry point for attackers.

Before the advent of the World Wide Web, email standardization and growth in the 1980s, especially within academia and military communities, led to interoperability. Fast forward 40 years, and this interoperability is once again a hot topic, with platforms like Threads, Mastodon, and other social media services aiming for the open communication that Jack Dorsey envisioned for Twitter. So, in 2024, it’s clear that social media, messaging apps like Slack, Teams, Google Chat, and others haven’t killed email, just as “video didn’t kill the radio star.”

The structure of a domain name.

The domain name system, managed by ICANN, encompasses a variety of TLDs, from the classic “.com” (1985) to the newer generic options. There are also the country-specific (ccTLDs), where the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is responsible for determining an appropriate trustee for each ccTLD. An extensive 2014 expansion by ICANN was designed to “increase competition and choice in the domain name space,” introducing numerous new options for specific professional, business, and informational purposes, which in turn, also opened up new possibilities for phishing attempts.

3.4 billion unwanted emails

Cloudflare’s Cloud Email Security service is helping protect our customers, and that also comes with insights. In 2022, Cloudflare blocked 2.4 billion unwanted emails, and in 2023 that number rose to over 3.4 billion unwanted emails, 26% of all messages processed. This total includes spam, malicious, and “bulk” (practice of sending a single email message, unsolicited or solicited, to a large number of recipients simultaneously) emails. That means an average of 9.3 million per day, 6500 per minute, 108 per second.

Bear in mind that new customers also make the numbers grow — in this case, driving a 42% increase in unwanted emails from 2022 to 2023. But this gives a sense of scale in this email area. Those unwanted emails can include malicious attacks that are difficult to detect, becoming more frequent, and can have devastating consequences for individuals and businesses that fall victim to them. Below, we’ll give more details on email threats, where malicious messages account for almost 3% of emails averaged across all of 2023 and it shows a growth tendency during the year, with higher percentages in the last months of the year. Let’s take a closer look.

Top phishing TLDs (and types of TLDs)

First, let’s start with an 2023 overview of top level domains with a high percentage of spam and malicious messages. Despite excluding TLDs with fewer than 20,000 emails, our analysis covers unwanted emails considered to be spam and malicious from more than 350 different TLDs (and yes, there are many more).

A quick overview highlights the TLDs with the highest rates of spam and malicious attacks as a proportion of their outbound email, those with the largest volume share of spam or malicious emails, and those with the highest rates of just-malicious and just-spam TLD senders. It reveals that newer TLDs, especially those associated with the beauty industry (generally available since 2021 and serving a booming industry), have the highest rates as a proportion of their emails. However, it’s relevant to recognize that “.com” accounts for 67% of all spam and malicious emails. Malicious emails often originate from recently created generic TLDs like “.bar”, “.makeup”, or “.cyou”, as well as certain country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) employed beyond their geographical implications.

Highest % of spam and malicious emails

Volume share
of spam + malicious 

Highest % of malicious 

Highest % of spam

TLD

Spam + mal %

TLD

Spam + mal %

TLD

Malicious %

TLD

Spam %

.uno

99%

.com

67%

.bar

70%

.autos

93%

.sbs

98%

.shop

5%

.makeup

63%

.today

92%

.best

97%

.net

4%

.cyou

62%

.directory

91%

.beauty

97%

.no

3%

.ml

56%

.boats

87%

.top

97%

.org

2%

.tattoo

54%

.center

85%

.hair

97%

.ru

1%

.om

47%

.monster

80%

.monster

96%

.jp

1%

.cfd

46%

.lol

79%

.cyou

96%

.click

1%

.skin

39%

.hair

78%

.wiki

95%

.beauty

1%

.uno

37%

.shop

78%

.makeup

95%

.cn

1%

.pw

37%

.beauty

77%

Focusing on volume share, “.com” dominates the spam + malicious list at 67%, and is joined in the top 3 by another “classic” gTLD, “.net”, at 4%. They also lead by volume when we look separately at the malicious (68% of all malicious emails are “.com” and “.net”) and spam (71%) categories, as shown below. All of the generic TLDs introduced since 2014 represent 13.4% of spam and malicious and over 14% of only malicious emails. These new TLDs (most of them are only available since 2016) are notable sources of both spam and malicious messages. Meanwhile, country-code TLDs contribute to more than 12% of both categories of unwanted emails.

This breakdown highlights the critical role of both established and new generic TLDs, which surpass older ccTLDs in terms of malicious emails, pointing to the changing dynamics of email-based threats.

Type of TLDs

Spam

Malicious 

Spam + malicious

ccTLDs

13%

12%

12%

.com and .net only

71%

68%

71%

new gTLDs 

13%

14%

13.4%

That said, “.shop” deserves a highlight of its own. The TLD, which has been available since 2016, is #2 by volume of spam and malicious emails, accounting for 5% of all of those emails. It also represents, when we separate those two categories, 5% of all malicious emails, and 5% of all spam emails. As we’re going to see below, its influence is growing.

Full 2023 top 50 spam & malicious TLDs list

For a more detailed perspective, below we present the top 50 TLDs with the highest percentages of spam and malicious emails during 2023. We also include a breakdown of those two categories.

It’s noticeable that even outside the top 10, other recent generic TLDs are also higher in the ranking, such as “.autos” (the #1 in the spam list), “.today”, “.bid” or “.cam”. TLDs that seem to promise entertainment or fun or are just leisure or recreational related (including “.fun” itself), occupy a position in our top 50 ranking.

2023 Top 50 spam & malicious TLDs (by highest %)

Rank

TLD

Spam %

Malicious %

Spam + malicious %

1

.uno

62%

37%

99%

2

.sbs

64%

35%

98%

3

.best

68%

29%

97%

4

.beauty

77%

20%

97%

5

.top

74%

23%

97%

6

.hair

78%

18%

97%

7

.monster

80%

17%

96%

8

.cyou

34%

62%

96%

9

.wiki

69%

26%

95%

10

.makeup

32%

63%

95%

11

.autos

93%

2%

95%

12

.today

92%

3%

94%

13

.shop

78%

16%

94%

14

.bid

74%

18%

92%

15

.cam

67%

25%

92%

16

.directory

91%

0%

91%

17

.icu

75%

15%

91%

18

.ml

33%

56%

89%

19

.lol

79%

10%

89%

20

.skin

49%

39%

88%

21

.boats

87%

1%

88%

22

.tattoo

34%

54%

87%

23

.click

61%

27%

87%

24

.ltd

70%

17%

86%

25

.rest

74%

11%

86%

26

.center

85%

0%

85%

27

.fun

64%

21%

85%

28

.cfd

39%

46%

84%

29

.bar

14%

70%

84%

30

.bio

72%

11%

84%

31

.tk

66%

17%

83%

32

.yachts

58%

23%

81%

33

.one

63%

17%

80%

34

.ink

68%

10%

78%

35

.wf

76%

1%

77%

36

.no

76%

0%

76%

37

.pw

39%

37%

75%

38

.site

42%

31%

73%

39

.life

56%

16%

72%

40

.homes

62%

10%

72%

41

.services

67%

2%

69%

42

.mom

63%

5%

68%

43

.ir

37%

29%

65%

44

.world

43%

21%

65%

45

.lat

40%

24%

64%

46

.xyz

46%

18%

63%

47

.ee

62%

1%

62%

48

.live

36%

26%

62%

49

.pics

44%

16%

60%

50

.mobi

41%

19%

60%

Change in spam & malicious TLD patterns

Let’s look at TLDs where spam + malicious emails comprised the largest share of total messages from that TLD, and how that list of TLDs changed from the first half of 2023 to the second half. This shows which TLDs were most problematic at different times during the year.

Highlighted in bold in the following table are those TLDs that climbed in the rankings for the percentage of spam and malicious emails from July to December 2023, compared with January to June. Generic TLDs “.uno”, “.makeup” and “.directory” appeared in the top list and in higher positions for the first time in the last six months of the year.

January – June 2023

July – Dec 2023

tld

Spam + malicious %

tld

Spam + malicious %

.click

99%

.uno

99%

.best

99%

.sbs

98%

.yachts

99%

.beauty

97%

.hair

99%

.best

97%

.autos

99%

.makeup

95%

.wiki

98%

.monster

95%

.today

98%

.directory

95%

.mom

98%

.bid

95%

.sbs

97%

.top

93%

.top

97%

.shop

92%

.monster

97%

.today

92%

.beauty

97%

.cam

92%

.bar

96%

.cyou

92%

.rest

95%

.icu

91%

.cam

95%

.boats

88%

.homes

94%

.wiki

88%

.pics

94%

.rest

88%

.lol

94%

.hair

87%

.quest

93%

.fun

87%

.cyou

93%

.cfd

86%

.ink

92%

.skin

85%

.shop

92%

.ltd

84%

.skin

91%

.one

83%

.ltd

91%

.center

83%

.tattoo

91%

.services

81%

.no

90%

.lol

78%

.ml

90%

.wf

78%

.center

90%

.pw

76%

.store

90%

.life

76%

.icu

89%

.click

75%

From the rankings, it’s clear that the recent generic TLDs have the highest spam and malicious percentage of all emails. The top 10 TLDs in both halves of 2023 are all recent and generic, with several introduced since 2021.

Reasons for the prominence of these gTLDs include the availability of domain names that can seem legitimate or mimic well-known brands, as we explain in this blog post. Cybercriminals often use popular or catchy words. Some gTLDs allow anonymous registration. Their low cost and the delay in updated security systems to recognize new gTLDs as spam and malicious sources also play a role — note that, as we’ve seen, cyber criminals also like to change TLDs and methods.

The impact of a lawsuit?

There’s also been a change in the types of domains with the highest malicious percentage in 2023, possibly due to Meta’s lawsuit against Freenom, filed in December 2022 and refiled in March 2023. Freenom provided domain name registry services for free in five ccTLDs, which wound up being used for purposes beyond local businesses or content: “.cf” (Central African Republic), “.ga” (Gabon), “.gq” (Equatorial Guinea), “.ml” (Mali), and “.tk” (Tokelau). However, Freenom stopped new registrations during 2023 following the lawsuit, and in February 2024, announced its decision to exit the domain name business.

Focusing on Freenom TLDs, which appeared in our top 50 ranking only in the first half of 2023, we see a clear shift. Since October, these TLDs have become less relevant in terms of all emails, including malicious and spam percentages. In February 2023, they accounted for 0.17% of all malicious emails we tracked, and 0.04% of all spam and malicious. Their presence has decreased since then, becoming almost non-existent in email volume in September and October, similar to other analyses.

TLDs ordered by volume of spam + malicious

In addition to looking at their share, another way to examine the data is to identify the TLDs that have a higher volume of spam and malicious emails — the next table is ordered that way. This means that we are able to show more familiar (and much older) TLDs, such as “.com”. We’ve included here the percentage of all emails in any given TLD that are classified as spam or malicious, and also spam + malicious to spotlight those that may require more caution. For instance, with high volume “.shop”, “.no”, “.click”, “.beauty”, “.top”, “.monster”, “.autos”, and “.today” stand out with a higher spam and malicious percentage (and also only malicious email percentage).

In the realm of country-code TLDs, Norway’s “.no” leads in spam, followed by China’s “.cn”, Russia’s “.ru”, Ukraine’s “.ua”, and Anguilla’s “.ai”, which recently has been used more for artificial intelligence-related domains than for the country itself.

In bold and red, we’ve highlighted the TLDs where spam + malicious represents more than 20% of all emails in that TLD — already what we consider a high number for domains with a lot of emails.

TLDs with more spam + malicious emails (in volume) in 2023

Rank

TLD

Spam %

Malicious %

Spam + mal %

1

.com

3.6%

0.8%

4.4%

2

.shop

77.8%

16.4%

94.2%

3

.net

2.8%

1.0%

3.9%

4

.no

76.0%

0.3%

76.3%

5

.org

3.3%

1.8%

5.2%

6

.ru

15.2%

7.7%

22.9%

7

.jp

3.4%

2.5%

5.9%

8

.click

60.6%

26.6%

87.2%

9

.beauty

77.0%

19.9%

96.9%

10

.cn

25.9%

3.3%

29.2%

11

.top

73.9%

22.8%

96.6%

12

.monster

79.7%

16.8%

96.5%

13

.de

13.0%

2.1%

15.2%

14

.best

68.1%

29.4%

97.4%

15

.gov

0.6%

2.0%

2.6%

16

.autos

92.6%

2.0%

94.6%

17

.ca

5.2%

0.5%

5.7%

18

.uk

3.2%

0.8%

3.9%

19

.today

91.7%

2.6%

94.3%

20

.io

3.6%

0.5%

4.0%

21

.us

5.7%

1.9%

7.6%

22

.co

6.3%

0.8%

7.1%

23

.biz

27.2%

14.0%

41.2%

24

.edu

0.9%

0.2%

1.1%

25

.info

20.4%

5.4%

25.8%

26

.ai

28.3%

0.1%

28.4%

27

.sbs

63.8%

34.5%

98.3%

28

.it

2.5%

0.3%

2.8%

29

.ua

37.4%

0.6%

38.0%

30

.fr

8.5%

1.0%

9.5%

The curious case of “.gov” email spoofing

When we concentrate our research on message volume to identify TLDs with more malicious emails blocked by our Cloud Email Security service, we discover a trend related to “.gov”.

TLDs ordered by malicious email volume

% of all malicious emails

.com

63%

.net

5%

.shop

5%

.org

3%

.gov

2%

.ru

2%

.jp

2%

.click

1%

.best

0.9%

.beauty

0.8%

The first three domains, “.com” (63%), “.net” (5%), and “.shop” (5%), were previously seen in our rankings and are not surprising. However, in fourth place is “.org”, known for being used by non-profit and other similar organizations, but it has an open registration policy. In fifth place is “.gov”, used only by the US government and administered by CISA. Our investigation suggests that it appears in the ranking because of typical attacks where cybercriminals pretend to be a legitimate address (email spoofing, creation of email messages with a forged sender address). In this case, they use “.gov” when launching attacks.

The spoofing behavior linked to “.gov” is similar to that of other TLDs. It includes fake senders failing SPF validation and other DNS-based authentication methods, along with various other types of attacks. An email failing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks typically indicates that a malicious sender is using an unauthorized IP, domain, or both. So, there are more straightforward ways to block spoofed emails without examining their content for malicious elements.

Ranking TLDs by proportions of malicious and spam email in 2023

In this section, we have included two lists: one ranks TLDs by the highest percentage of malicious emails — those you should exercise greater caution with; the second ranks TLDs by just their spam percentage. These contrast with the previous top 50 list ordered by combined spam and malicious percentages. In the case of malicious emails, the top 3 with the highest percentage are all generic TLDs. The #1 was “.bar”, with 70% of all emails being categorized as malicious, followed by “.makeup”, and “.cyou” — marketed as the phrase “see you”.

The malicious list also includes some country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) not primarily used for country-related topics, like .ml (Mali), .om (Oman), and .pw (Palau). The list also includes other ccTLDs such as .ir (Iran) and .kg (Kyrgyzstan), .lk (Sri Lanka).

In the spam realm, it’s “autos”, with 93%, and other generic TLDs such as “.today”, and “.directory” that take the first three spots, also seeing shares over 90%.

2023 ordered by malicious email %

2023 ordered by spam email %

tld

Malicious % 

tld

Spam %

.bar

70%

.autos

93%

.makeup

63%

.today

92%

.cyou

62%

.directory

91%

.ml

56%

.boats

87%

.tattoo

54%

.center

85%

.om

47%

.monster

80%

.cfd

46%

.lol

79%

.skin

39%

.hair

78%

.uno

37%

.shop

78%

.pw

37%

.beauty

77%

.sbs

35%

.no

76%

.site

31%

.wf

76%

.store

31%

.icu

75%

.best

29%

.bid

74%

.ir

29%

.rest

74%

.lk

27%

.top

74%

.work

27%

.bio

72%

.click

27%

.ltd

70%

.wiki

26%

.wiki

69%

.live

26%

.best

68%

.cam

25%

.ink

68%

.lat

24%

.cam

67%

.yachts

23%

.services

67%

.top

23%

.tk

66%

.world

21%

.sbs

64%

.fun

21%

.fun

64%

.beauty

20%

.one

63%

.mobi

19%

.mom

63%

.kg

19%

.uno

62%

.hair

18%

.homes

62%

How it stands in 2024: new higher-risk TLDs

2024 has seen new players enter the high-risk zone for unwanted emails. In this list we have only included the new TLDs that weren’t in the top 50 during 2023, and joined the list in January. New entrants include Samoa’s “.ws”, Indonesia’s “.id” (also used because of its “identification” meaning), and the Cocos Islands’ “.cc”. These ccTLDs, often used for more than just country-related purposes, have shown high percentages of malicious emails, ranging from 20% (.cc) to 95% (.ws) of all emails.

January 2024: Newer TLDs in the top 50 list

TLD

Spam %

Malicious %

Spam + mal %

.ws

3%

95%

98%

.company

96%

0%

96%

.digital

72%

2%

74%

.pro

66%

6%

73%

.tz

62%

4%

65%

.id

13%

39%

51%

.cc

25%

21%

46%

.space

32%

8%

40%

.enterprises

2%

37%

40%

.lv

30%

1%

30%

.cn

26%

3%

29%

.jo

27%

1%

28%

.info

21%

5%

26%

.su

20%

5%

25%

.ua

23%

1%

24%

.museum

0%

24%

24%

.biz

16%

7%

24%

.se

23%

0%

23%

.ai

21%

0%

21%

Overview of email threat trends since 2023

With Cloudflare’s Cloud Email Security, we gain insight into the broader email landscape over the past months. The spam percentage of all emails stood at 8.58% in 2023. As mentioned before, keep in mind with these percentages that our protection typically kicks in after other email providers’ filters have already removed some spam and malicious emails.

How about malicious emails? Almost 3% of all emails were flagged as malicious during 2023, with the highest percentages occurring in Q4. Here’s the “malicious” evolution, where we’re also including the January and February 2024 perspective:

The week before Christmas and the first week of 2024 experienced a significant spike in malicious emails, reaching an average of 7% and 8% across the weeks, respectively. Not surprisingly, there was a noticeable decrease during Christmas week, when it dropped to 3%. Other significant increases in the percentage of malicious emails were observed the week before Valentine’s Day, the first week of September (coinciding with returns to work and school in the Northern Hemisphere), and late October.

Threat categories in 2023

We can also look to different types of threats in 2023. Links were present in 49% of all threats. Other categories included extortion (36%), identity deception (27%), credential harvesting (23%), and brand impersonation (18%). These categories are defined and explored in detail in Cloudflare’s 2023 phishing threats report. Extortion saw the most growth in Q4, especially in November and December reaching 38% from 7% of all threats in Q1 2023.

Other trends: Attachments are still popular

Other less “threatening” trends show that 20% of all emails included attachments (as the next chart shows), while 82% contained links in the body. Additionally, 31% were composed in plain text, and 18% featured HTML, which allows for enhanced formatting and visuals. 39% of all emails used remote content.

Conclusion: Be cautious, prepared, safe

The landscape of spam and malicious (or phishing) emails constantly evolves alongside technology, the Internet, user behaviors, use cases, and cybercriminals. As we’ve seen through Cloudflare’s Cloud Email Security insights, new generic TLDs have emerged as preferred channels for these malicious activities, highlighting the need for vigilance when dealing with emails from unfamiliar domains.

There’s no shortage of advice on staying safe from phishing. Email remains a ubiquitous yet highly exploited tool in daily business operations. Cybercriminals often bait users into clicking malicious links within emails, a tactic used by both sophisticated criminal organizations and novice attackers. So, always exercise caution online.

Cloudflare’s Cloud Email Security provides insights that underscore the importance of robust cybersecurity infrastructure in fighting the dynamic tactics of phishing attacks.

If you want to learn more about email security, you can check Cloudflare Radar’s new email section, visit our Learning Center or reach out for a complimentary phishing risk assessment for your organization.

(Contributors to this blog post include Jeremy Eckman, Phil Syme, and Oren Falkowitz.)

Undersea cable failures cause Internet disruptions for multiple African countries

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/undersea-cable-failures-cause-internet-disruptions-across-africa-march-14-2024


Internet connectivity in several African countries was disrupted today, March 14, 2024. Beginning at approximately 05:00 UTC, west and central African countries were most impacted, as was South Africa. Based on published reports and social media posts from impacted network providers, the disruption is believed to be due to multiple undersea cable failures in the region. From The Gambia to Côte d’Ivoire, including a major network in South Africa (Vodacom), a total of 11 African countries were impacted, based on our observations.

Cloudflare Radar data shows a pattern of disruptions from the north to the south of West Africa over time. It began south of Senegal, with The Gambia, Guinea, and Liberia experiencing disruptions around 05:00 UTC.

In The Gambia and Guinea, the disruptions lasted about 30 minutes, while in Liberia, the disruption has lasted more than 12 hours.

Moving south, around 07:30 UTC, disruptions were observed in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.

Niger, a landlocked nation in Central Africa, experienced a disruption at 09:15, lasting just over two hours.

This was followed by disruptions starting around 10:30 UTC in Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, and Togo. These disruptions were ongoing at the time of writing.

At approximately the same time, a significant disruption was observed on Vodacom’s South African network (AS29975). Traffic began to recover after 13:30 UTC, and appears to have reached close to normal levels by 16:00 UTC.

The importance of submarine cables

This series of disruptions serves as a reminder of how dependent the Internet is on submarine cables, which are estimated to carry over 90% of intercontinental data traffic. Only a small percentage of general use is done via satellite networks. There are 529 active submarine cables and 1,444 landings that are currently active or under construction, running to an estimated 1.3 million km around the globe.

We have written about submarine cable-related outages before, from Tonga to the AAE-1 & SMW5 cable cuts of June 2022.

Reports from several local networks, including South Africa’s Vodacom, MTN in Nigeria, and Celtiis in Bénin, reference multiple submarine cable failures. Microsoft was more detailed, stating on their Azure status page that “multiple fiber cables on the West Coast of Africa — WACS, MainOne, SAT3, ACE — have been impacted which reduced total capacity supporting our Regions in South Africa”. The company also explains that the recent cable cuts in the Red Sea in combination with today’s cable issues, “has impacted all Africa capacity”.

In addition to the impacts to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, the website of MainOne, owners of the MainOne submarine cable, was offline for several hours. DNS for mainone.net is handled by name servers located in MainOne’s address space. It appears that a portion of the IPv4 address space for AS37282 (MAINONE) stopped being announced between 07:30 and 15:00 UTC, and once this address space was being routed again, both the nameservers and website became reachable.

This map from TeleGeography highlights the impacted submarine cables: WACS (West Africa Cable System), MainOne, SAT-3/WASC, and ACE.

The disruptions are now being reported by news media outlets, including in South Africa, where the emphasis is not only on the latest outage but also on the problem with the submarine cable operator Seacom. This operator experienced a service-impacting outage on its cable system in the Red Sea. On March 8, the company stated that it is waiting for permits to start repairing its broken submarine cable in the Red Sea.

We will keep monitoring the situation. Follow the Cloudflare Radar Outage Center for the latest updates, and follow us on social media at @CloudflareRadar (X), cloudflare.social/@radar (Mastodon), and radar.cloudflare.com (Bluesky).

From Google to Generative AI: Ranking top Internet services in 2023

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original http://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2023-year-in-review-internet-services/


From Google to Generative AI: Ranking top Internet services in 2023

Ask nearly any Internet user, and they are bound to have their own personal list of favorite sites, applications, and Internet services for news, messaging, video, AI chatbots, music, and more. Sum that question up across a lot of users in a lot of different countries, and you end up with a sense of the most popular websites and services in the world. In a nutshell, that’s what this blog post is about: how humans interacted with the online world in 2023 from what Cloudflare observed.

Building on similar reports we’ve done over the past two years, we have compiled a ranking of the top Internet properties of 2023. In addition to our overall ranking, we chose 9 categories to focus on. One of these is a new addition in 2023: Generative AI. Here are the 9 categories we’ll be digging into:

1. Generative AI
2. Social Media
3. E-commerce
4. Video Streaming
5. News
6. Messaging
7. Metaverse & Gaming
8. Financial Services
9. Cryptocurrency Services

Our method for calculating the results is the same as in 2022: we analyze anonymized DNS query data from our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver, used by millions of people around the world. To build the lists of Internet services, we use two additional methods. First, we aggregate domains that belong to one online service. For instance, for Twitter/X, we include twitter.com, t.co, and x.com among others. Second, we reference our large source list of domains and identify the sites that provide services to humans. That means that our rankings do not include every domain seen in the data (for example, we exclude domains such as root-servers.net and cloudflare-dns.com). A site’s overall ranking is relative to other sites that meet these criteria; its rank within a category is relative to other sites in the same category. That’s important to note: just because a site has gone down in the rankings, it doesn’t necessarily mean its traffic has declined — it could just be that other sites’ traffic increased. Similarly, the inverse is true. What we’re doing here isn’t tracking absolute traffic, but rather, relative popularity.

With that, we can begin our analysis. Following the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT launch on November 30, 2022, Generative AI has captivated both the world and the news. OpenAI is now close to ranking among our top 100 most popular Internet services overall, rising from #200 in January.

In e-commerce, low price and fast fashion marketplace Temu experienced similar growth, becoming the year’s surprise by surpassing Shein and other major players, reaching #7 in its category. And Black Friday was the best day for several other e-commerce services, as well as payment services such as PayPal, Stripe and Klarna.

In social media, X/Twitter lost some ground in our Overall ranking, but maintained its status as a significant online discussion platform. New additions like Threads by Instagram, launched in July, are still gaining their footing in the category. Additionally, we observed notable news-related trends linked to events such as the March 2023 United States banking crisis, the Titan submersible implosion, the Wagner Group rebellion, and the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

We close our report out with a discussion of a range of trends that don’t fit neatly into our other categories, including a look at Taylor Swift’s and Beyoncé websites — both of which appeared in our overall traffic rankings.

Keep reading for a detailed look at the evolution of trends throughout the year. For more, visit our 2023 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review microsite. Along with the lists of most popular Internet services, the Year in Review site and its associated blog post explore a number of additional metrics.

Google is #1. Facebook, Apple and TikTok follow

Since we began reporting these rankings in 2021, we always start with an Overall Top 10 list. These are the services that are the top Internet properties globally in 2023, based on DNS traffic through our 1.1.1.1 resolver. Unsurprisingly, Google (we’re including here services like Google Maps and Google Flights that use google.com, for example) remained the #1 most popular Internet service in our Overall ranking. Since we implemented our new ranking method last year, no other service has challenged Google’s position as the #1 leader in our rankings.

  1. Google
  2. Facebook
  3. Apple
  4. TikTok
  5. Microsoft
  6. YouTube
  7. AWS
  8. Instagram
  9. Amazon
  10. iCloud

Beyond Google, Facebook was consistently #2, while Apple (that uses, for example, apple.com for several use cases, including on iPhone related services) was generally #3, except when TikTok took the spot in April. Microsoft mostly held the #5 ranking, although it sometimes traded places with YouTube at #6.

AWS — we’re separating it from Amazon by using domains like amazonaws.com — held a firm position at #7, and Instagram was clearly #8 through the year, with a few exceptions involving Amazon. The #10 position changed more frequently, alternating between iCloud (for which we use domains such as icloud.com, distinct from apple.com), Netflix (mainly on weekends), and Microsoft Office. In the chart below, you can follow the evolution of the top Internet services in our Overall ranking throughout the year.

In 2022, X/Twitter ranked as high as #10 in our Overall ranking, but never reached this spot in 2023. We’ll talk more about X/Twitter’s performance in the Social Media category below.

Ready to face the Generative AI era?

The Generative AI category became a global phenomenon in 2023, though it started gaining attention in late November 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT from OpenAI. We tested it on our ‘This Week in NET’ show on December 2, 2022, and were impressed. It’s not surprising that OpenAI was popular early in 2023 and topped this list. Other generative AI services also emerged during the year.

Top 10 — Generative AI services 2023

  1. OpenAI
  2. character.ai
  3. QuillBot
  4. Hugging Face
  5. Poe
  6. Perplexity
  7. Wordtune
  8. Bard
  9. ProWritingAid
  10. Voicemod

Significant changes occurred below Open AI’s #1 spot throughout the year. After mid-year, we noticed a shift, when character.ai took the #2 spot from Quillbot. Quora’s Poe AI, which combines several AI chatbots including ChatGPT, entered the top 10 in late March, holding the #3 spot until late April before settling at #4.

This figure shows movement among the Generative AI services that were more popular later in the year:

AI model platform Hugging Face was typically #5, but Google’s Bard also reached #5 in November. Bard, launched in limited regions in March, made our top 10 within the category after its broader release in Europe and Brazil. It was #7 from July to September before peaking later in the year.

Other Generative AI services that became important in our list later in 2023 include Anthropic’s Claude (whose new model, Claude 2, launched in July, though it is not yet available in the European Union). It was #5 in August before dropping to #6 after September. Perplexity AI, a ChatGPT competitor, was #8 after September.

Midjourney, which relies on Discord bot commands to create artwork, peaked at #3 in late March but started declining, dropping to #5 in April and May, and then to #10 in September.

Other AI-inclusive services like Prowritingaid, Voicemod, and Wordtune were more popular earlier in the year but became less so later on. Bardeen was in the top 10 in May and June, while Descript appeared at #9 between March and May.

Notable trends that we observed when looking at trends for Generative AI services in our larger Overall ranking include:

  • OpenAI, which was around #200 in our Overall ranking in early January, saw a significant rise between March and April (OpenAI launched GPT-4 and plugins during that time) and is now near the top 100. It peaked early in November (#104 on November 9), right after OpenAI’s first developer conference on November 6 in San Francisco. The brief removal of Sam Altman in late November didn’t have a noticeable impact.
  • character.ai‘s growth was similar to OpenAI, rising from the top 500 in early January to around #200 recently. Quillbot remained steady throughout the year, around #258.
  • Poe AI peaked at #276 on June 18 and is now around #290. Claude AI was around #380 in November after a late August peak at #337.

Social media: The Facebook (not X) effect

An analysis from Kepios estimates that there are 4.95 billion social media users around the world in 2023, comprising 61.4% of the world population, so this category plays a big role in our everyday life as a central stage for communication, information, and general attention.

Unsurprisingly, social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram rank high in our most popular Internet properties and are featured in our Top 10 Overall Internet services list.

Within our Social Media category list, the top five remained the same as last year. Facebook was #1, followed by TikTok (#2), Instagram (#3), X/Twitter (#4), and Snapchat (#5).

Top 10 — Social Media services 2023

  1. Facebook
  2. TikTok
  3. Instagram
  4. X/Twitter
  5. Snapchat
  6. LinkedIn
  7. Discord
  8. Reddit
  9. Pinterest
  10. Kwai

In contrast to 2022, when Twitter (renamed X in July 2023) and Instagram often swapped places at #3, this year X/Twitter never challenged Instagram in our rankings.

LinkedIn held a strong #6, with Discord challenging it during a few days in January and April.

Reddit, usually at #8, competed with Discord for the #7 spot in February and March but fell back to #8 in April, concurrent with the controversy around Reddit API changes. Reddit often challenged Discord on weekdays, while Discord was more popular on weekends. Following these are Pinterest (#9) and Kwai, the Chinese video app popular in Brazil, Indonesia, and other countries (#10). Here’s the top 10 chart across 2023:

A Twitter (or X) drop after a possible football (or soccer) peak

Let’s continue on social media, but leave its specific category and examine how social media services fared in our Overall ranking where bigger shifts between services are seen.

The graph below depicts the position of Instagram and Twitter in the Overall ranking. Instagram consistently ranked in the top 10, typically holding positions #8 or #9 with brief dips to #10 around May 2023.

X/Twitter, which reached as high as #8 overall last year following the start of the war in Ukraine, ended 2022 at #12 and continued its downward trend in 2023. It started between #12 and #16, lower than last year, and ended between #13 and #19. Here’s how these two evolved in 2023:

We noticed that X/Twitter was particularly popular on weekends, peaking at #11 or #12 between April 15 and June 10. ​​Specifically, it ranked at #11 in the weekends before May 14 and then at #12 from May 14 to June 10. This coincides with key moments in European football competitions. However, after the European Champions League final on June 10, X/Twitter never reached those heights again.

Let’s explore this possible football (or soccer) Twitter trend. X/Twitter’s rankings peaked around significant moments in the English Premier League (arguably the most-watched sports league in the world), particularly when Manchester City made crucial advances to their title after April 15. The trend lasted until the European Champions League final on June 10, where City’s victory and historic treble coincided with X/Twitter’s final peak ranking of the year — the weekend of June 3, when there were already no Premier League games, and X/Twitter dropped to #13.

Alternatives to X/Twitter: Mastodon, Threads, and others

Tumblr, a more established platform than other recent alternatives, fluctuated between #125 and #153 in our Overall ranking, showing a downward trend. Close behind was an aggregation of several hundred Mastodon servers, ranking between #160 and #200.

Threads from Instagram/Meta (seen in the next chart), peaked at #227 on July 6 in our Overall ranking, then dropped but recovered to around #300 after late August, and did not make it into the top 10 social media services ranking for 2023. For context, Kwai (#10 in the Social Media ranking) usually ranks around our Overall top 50.

Bluesky, a newer entrant, first appeared in our Top 500 in late August, with a first spike at #432 on September 19 and reaching the top 400 in November, peaking at #397 on November 19. Truth Social had a peak at #318 on August 23 but then dropped, averaging around #450 in November.

Other social apps including Hive Social, Counter Social, Post.News, T2/Pebble, Parler, etc., didn’t appear in our Overall 500 ranking.

Here are some other trends we observed among social media apps, and how they did in our Overall ranking:

  • Snapchat was more popular on weekends, fluctuating between #18 and #21 overall, with improved performance after October, with several days at #18, close to X/Twitter.
  • Discord was also more popular on weekends, varying between #24 and #35, peaking in April at #24. It had a similar trend to Midjourney, the generative AI image service that generates images for its users on Discord. It ended the year around #32.
  • Reddit, which was more popular on weekdays, dropped in our ranking during the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, in contrast with other social media services, and moved between #30 and #38.
  • Quora was also more popular on weekdays, and fluctuated between #116 and #146, dropping in summer and settling around #130 in November.
  • Tinder, the social dating app, fell from a peak of #124 to #133 in November, and is much more popular on Sundays.
  • OnlyFans showed steady growth, peaking at #148 in early July and settling around #175. The adult oriented social content subscription service was more popular on the weekends, particularly on Sundays.
  • BeReal, a French social media app for daily photo sharing, approached but did not enter the Social Media top 10 ranking, and grew to a peak of #141 in our Overall ranking in September but fell in November.

E-commerce: Temu means growth

E-commerce remains as relevant as ever, something that is especially evident in our recent Cyber Week blog post. Amazon consistently tops the category, with Taobao as a solid #2. In 2022, eBay was mostly #2 but has now dropped to #3, although it had several days in early 2023 in the #2 spot, as well as on June 19.

Top 10 — E-commerce services 2023

  1. Amazon
  2. Taobao
  3. eBay
  4. Shopify
  5. Alibaba
  6. AliExpress
  7. Temu
  8. Rakuten
  9. Mercado Libre
  10. Walmart

Throughout the year, Shopify was a solid #4, overtaking eBay at #3 on Black Friday. Alibaba was #5, peaking on Singles’ Day, November 11. AliExpress followed at #6.

Rakuten and Temu battled for the #7 ranking in 2023. Temu, the Chinese-owned and Boston-based low price and fast fashion marketplace (launched in the US in September 2022) was definitely one of the surprises of the year. It expanded to Canada, Australia and New Zealand in February, and ended 2023 as #7 in front of Rakuten. It ranked #6 at times during the year, including Black Friday. Temu wasn’t in our top 10 in 2022.

The South American e-commerce platform Mercado Libre, the American retail giant Walmart, and the fast fashion brand Shein, ‘battled’ during the year for the 9th and 10th place rankings in the E-commerce category.

Looking at how e-commerce sites did in our Overall ranking, we observed the following trends:

  • Amazon finished the year at #9 overall, reaching #8 on its Prime Day shopping event (July 11-12) and Black Friday.
  • Shein, the Chinese fast fashion brand, showed growth, starting at around #130 in January and ending around #120. It’s a similar trend to the one we observed in 2022.
  • Temu was not in the top 200 in January but finished in the top 100, peaking on Black Friday at #84 — a similar trend was seen in OpenAI performance. Temu also overtook Shein in May 2023.
  • Best Buy also peaked on Black Friday in 2023, as did Nike, Adidas, Victoria’s Secret, and H&M. Zara’s best day was November 23.
  • Target first peaked on November 12 at #134 and again on Black Friday at #135.
  • Ikea didn’t perform as well during Black Friday week in our ranking, and had its 2023 peak on June 14-15 (#172), when it launched its own summer sale and a remote interior design AI related strategy.
  • Alibaba’s highest position in 2023 was on Single’s Day, November 11, at #67.

Video streaming: YouTube and Netflix remain uncontested

Video streaming platforms continue to play a central role in entertaining us. YouTube remains the top service for all video streaming, with Netflix as a close second. However, within our rankings, Netflix is the clear leader among paid streaming services, followed by Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and HBO/HBO Max.

Top 10 — Video streaming services 2023

  1. YouTube
  2. Netflix
  3. Twitch
  4. Roku
  5. Disney Plus
  6. Prime Video
  7. Hulu
  8. HBO/Max
  9. Vimeo
  10. Pluto TV

Twitch, which has a significant amount of video game live-streaming content, secured the #3 spot, as it did in 2022. Roku, a digital media player that also offers streaming services, ranked #4. Following are Disney Plus, Prime Video, Hulu, and HBO/Max (now known as Max), with Vimeo surpassing Pluto TV later in the year. Dailymotion also made a top 10 appearance in late February for a few days.

Throughout the year, Disney+ occasionally challenged Roku, especially on weekends following the premiere of the Star Wars-related miniseries Ahsoka on August 23.

Looking at how video streaming services performed in our Overall ranking, we found:

  • Netflix peaked at #9 on Sundays in April and May, coinciding with the release of ‘The Diplomat‘ starring Keri Russell — it was the most watched show on the platform at that time. Netflix, Prime Video, HBO/Max, were more popular on weekends.
  • Prime Video was more popular earlier in the year, peaking at #50 on March 26, the weekend ‘Top Gun: Maverick‘ premiered.
  • HBO/Max has been dropping in our Overall ranking since September but remains in the top 100.
  • Peacock, NBC’s streaming service, peaked at #111 in October and was more popular on Sundays.
  • Paramount Plus has been falling in our Overall ranking, down to around #156 in November, and is also more popular on Sundays.

The News: Globo and BBC global perspectives

News organizations worldwide play a crucial role in keeping the public informed, especially during times of crisis like pandemics, wars, or financial uncertainty. With that in mind, the ranking of news organizations also highlights a few newsworthy trends.

Top 10 — News services 2023

  1. Globo
  2. BBC
  3. Fox News
  4. CNN
  5. NY Times
  6. Daily Mail
  7. Washington Post
  8. The Guardian
  9. NPR
  10. Wall Street Journal

Last year, BBC and Globo tied for #1 in this category. In 2023, Globo — a Brazilian media conglomerate popular in South America, was consistently #1, followed by the BBC, the UK’s national broadcaster. The only exception was on June 20, when the BBC was #1. This coincided with the Titan submersible implosion on June 18, which remained in global news for most of the following week.

Fox News and CNN also played a key role in our list. Fox News was overtaken by CNN for the #3 spot from July onwards, though Fox led again in November. The New York Times held a steady #5, followed by the Daily Mail and NPR, with the Washington Post overtaking NPR in June.

The ranking lower in the top 10 fluctuated more, with the Wall Street Journal mostly at #9, reaching #8 in September. The Guardian was #8 in October, coinciding with the start of the Hamas-Israel conflict on October 7.

Titan submersible implosion & the Hamas-Israel conflict

Notable news trends we identified in our larger Overall ranking include:

  • CNN had its 2023 peak on June 22, reaching #73, and was already higher than usual in the previous days. That was the day the United States Coast Guard announced that they had discovered debris from the Titan submersible implosion, confirming that the five people aboard were dead. The other peak of the year for CNN was February 14, Valentine’s Day.
  • The Daily Mail (#127) and The Indian Express (#389) also peaked on June 22, with Fox News also reaching one of its highest ranks on that day, although it was higher in early January.
  • German news outlet Bild also peaked on June 22, while Der Spiegel‘s highest point was the previous day, June 21.
  • BBC, had a significant peak in our Overall list on October 8, following the Hamas attack on Israel, reaching #76. It also moved higher in the news category ranking on that day, as noted above.
  • RT, the Russian news organization, showed a decline throughout the year but peaked on June 24 (#234) during the Wagner Group rebellion in Russia.
  • Israeli newspapers Times of Israel and Haaretz jumped into our Overall ranking on October 7, the day of the Hamas attack on Israel. The former had its peak on October 9 at #275, the latter on October 8 at #393.
  • The Washington Post peaked on April 4-5 (#117), coinciding with Finland joining NATO and Donald Trump’s not guilty plea after becoming the first US president to be indicted.
  • China Daily appeared in our top 500 in January, peaking on January 20 at #361, ahead of the Chinese New Year on January 22. A similar rise was seen in the South China Morning Post.
  • TMZ‘s highest rank was on October 29 (#243), following the announcement of the TV star Matthew Perry‘s death.
  • BuzzFeed, combining buzzfeed.com and buzzfeednews.com, declined in our Overall ranking, especially after the summer, falling to around #300 in November. In April 2023, it was announced that BuzzFeed News would be shutting down, and it did so in May.

Messaging: WhatsApp rules & Telegram rises

Messaging is seen as a type of social media and remains as relevant as ever including for specific communication purposes. Apple’s iMessage is not included in this category, because it doesn’t have a unique domain name whose traffic can be analyzed. Keeping that in mind, WhatsApp remained the top messaging service in 2023, consistent with its position in 2022.

Top — Messaging services 2023

  1. WhatsApp
  2. QQ
  3. Viber
  4. Telegram
  5. LINE
  6. Signal
  7. WeChat
  8. Messenger
  9. GroupMe
  10. Kik

Following WhatsApp is the Chinese service QQ, also known as Tencent QQ, which includes games and mobile payments and is popular in Asia, at #2. Viber, popular in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, comes next. The top three are unchanged from 2022. Telegram, widely used in Eastern Europe and Asia, holds the #4 spot. LINE from Japan briefly contested this position early in 2023. Signal follows, and the Chinese app WeChat is at #7, ahead of Facebook’s Messenger.

The list concludes with Microsoft’s GroupMe and the Canadian service Kik Messenger. The standings are similar to 2022, but Telegram, WeChat, and Signal have shown improvements.

Here are other messaging trends from our Overall ranking:

  • WhatsApp‘s was generally most popular between late May and early September, though its peak came on November 14th, when it reached #13 in our Overall ranking (a rank it shared that month with X/Twitter).
  • Telegram rose to #79 overall on June 24, following the Wagner Group rebellion in Russia, which occurred June 23-24.
  • WeChat saw a significant spike the first quarter of the year on January 21-22, Chinese New Year‘s Eve and respective New Year day. WeChat peaked in 2023 at #122 on August 19, coinciding with news regarding China’s military drills around Taiwan.

Metaverse & Gaming: Roblox leads, Oculus grows

Is gaming part of the metaverse? In a sense, one could argue that it depends on the game, given that it is all about being immersed in another world. Concepts aside, we’ve included both in the same category since last year. Roblox was the uncontested winner of this category in 2023, followed by two services that are now much more than just popular gaming consoles, but also popular online gaming services: Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation.

Top 10 — Metaverse & Gaming services 2023

  1. Roblox
  2. Xbox/Xbox Live
  3. Epic Games/Fortnite
  4. PlayStation
  5. Oculus
  6. Steam
  7. Electronic Arts
  8. Blizzard
  9. Nintendo
  10. Riot Games/League of Legends

Xbox and PlayStation were at the podium of the list for most of the year. The top spots were similar to 2022, but PlayStation, which was #3 last year, was surpassed by Epic Games (known for Fortnite) during the last part of 2023.

Oculus, a VR headset and also metaverse experience service owned by Meta (we’re considering domains related to those two aspects provided by Meta’s Reality Labs), rose in the rankings to #5, continuing a trend from late 2022. It reached as high as #2 on June 29, and again on October 3-4 after the announcement of Quest 3 at Meta Connect 2023.

Steam was more popular than Oculus from July to September, reaching #5. Electronic Arts was a solid #7 throughout the year, and Blizzard (famous for World of Warcraft and an Activision Blizzard subsidiary), was mostly in #8. The top 10 list ends with Nintendo and Riot Games/League of Legends ‘battling’ for the #9 and #10 spots, with the latter overtaking Nintendo since September.

Here’s the top 10 chart across 2023:

Financial services: Stripe takes the lead, Black Friday impact

The financial services sector is diverse, ranging from traditional banking to cryptocurrency-only services to tax-related services. This year, Stripe, an Irish-American payment platform, dethroned PayPal as the top service in this category.

Top 10 — Financial Services 2023

  1. Stripe
  2. PayPal
  3. Alipay
  4. TradingView
  5. Nubank (BR)
  6. Intuit
  7. American Express
  8. Binance
  9. Bradesco Bank
  10. CoinGecko

PayPal started the year at #1 but was overtaken by Stripe on most days since March. PayPal still led on some weekends during the summer and on Black Friday. TradingView lost its #3 spot to Alipay in late July. Intuit was more popular early in the year, peaking on April 18, the Tax Day in the United States, but ended mostly at #5 on weekdays (see our 2022 blog post on how Tax Day impacts related sites for more on this trend).

The Brazilian Nubank, an online-only bank or neobank, and the largest of its kind in Latin America, was a surprise at #6, often reaching higher ranks on weekends, especially on Saturdays, as it peaked on June 3 and July 1.

Focusing on specific crypto services in the Financial category (more on crypto below), we can see that Binance lost ground throughout 2023, especially after August moving between #8 and #9. This is a change from its trend in 2022, when Binance was on a growth trajectory and ranked #6. CoinGecko, a cryptocurrency data aggregation and tracking website, made a late appearance in 2023 with several days as #6 in November, and Coinbase appeared at #10 after late October. Here’s the crypto perspective in this Financial services category:

Here are other financial services trends from our Overall ranking

  • Investing.com‘s peak at #199 occurred on March 13, three days after the collapse and seizure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), and the same day that bank shares plunged on contagion fears — a period known as the 2023 US banking crisis. It was the same day MarketWatch also peaked (#293).
  • Online-only financial services such as PayPal (#71) and Klarna (#211) reached their annual peak in our Overall ranking on Black Friday, November 24. Stripe, however, had a clear spike at #77 on that day, but its best day was on November 10, at #68.
  • Venmo, an American mobile payment service owned by PayPal, had its best month in September.

Crypto: Binance declines and CoinGecko rises

In addition to our Financial Services category, we also evaluated cryptocurrency-related services in particular. Despite the disappearance of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX from our rankings after its bankruptcy in November 2022, the crypto sector continues to show several changes this year. Binance, Coinbase, and CoinGecko (a provider of crypto data tools) remain at the top of the list, a trend similar to 2022. While Binance held on to its #1 position across most of 2023, in the last month it was overtaken by CoinGecko.

Top 10 — Cryptocurrency services 2023

  1. Binance
  2. CoinGecko
  3. Coinbase
  4. CoinMarketCap
  5. NiceHash
  6. OKX
  7. MEXC
  8. CryptoCompare
  9. Kraken
  10. Crypto.com

Throughout the year, CoinGecko gained momentum, surpassing the cryptocurrency exchange platforms Binance and Coinbase in November. CoinMarketCap and NiceHash were also prominent, with CoinMarketCap reaching #4 by October. OKX, MEXC, and Crypto.com were already in the top 10 in 2022, and CryptoCompare, Kraken, and Trust: Crypto & Bitcoin, which also competed for the #10 position, were new inclusions in 2023. Kucoin and Etherscan fell out of the 2023 top 10 after being there in 2022.

What happened to Binance? In both the Financial Services and Cryptocurrency categories, we noticed Binance, a key cryptocurrency player, lost its leading position in 2023, dropping to #2 in November. The company faced challenges in July, with several top executives leaving. Then, in November, US authorities filed a lawsuit against Binance, resulting in multiple charges and fines. In our Overall ranking, Binance’s highest point was on April 19, the day after US Tax Day, ranking at #122. However, its rank fell later, though it slightly improved to around #140 by November.

Outside the categories we reviewed in the Year in Review, several notable trends emerged in our Overall ranking:

  • Beyoncé’s official site went even higher on our overall ranking than Swift’s. It appeared only on June 15, but reached #346. In the news that day (and the day before), the Financial Times reported that economists at Danske Bank believed that Beyoncé’s decision to start her world tour in Stockholm led to a surge in local hotel prices that resulted in inflation in Sweden, calling it “astonishing for a single event”. At the time, June 15, Beyoncé had a Cologne, Germany, concert, where a fan gender reveal also made the news.
  • GitHub is a top 50 site in our Overall ranking, and it showed clear growth in 2023, moving from #49 to #42 in November. It reached its highest point at #36 on January 19, when it announced reaching 100 million developers, and had another peak on May 12 at #38. Have any guesses about what contributed to these peaks (or any of the others you see in our report)? Let us know at @CloudflareRadar.
  • Spotify’s best day in 2023 was on Black Friday, November 24, when it reached #57, after showing significant growth throughout November. However, our list ends on November 25, so we couldn’t capture the impact of the recently launched Spotify Wrapped.
  • NASA. This year, NASA continued to showcase images from the James Webb Space Telescope. The NASA website peaked in our ranking on October 12 at #160, the day before the scheduled launch of NASA’s Psyche mission, aimed at exploring a unique metal-rich asteroid. Another peak occurred on April 28 at #172, coinciding with a broadcasted spacewalk at the International Space Station.
  • SpaceX. SpaceX had its best and only notable days in our ranking (within the overall top 500) on April 17 (#412), followed by April 20 (#416). April 17 marked SpaceX’s Starship orbital flight‘s first attempt, which was aborted just before launch and then resumed on April 20.
  • Craigslist. The American classified ads website saw a decline in our ranking this year, with its lowest point in November and its worst day on Black Friday, when it fell to #268.
  • DHL. The courier service improved its ranking in 2023, with its best performance in November, peaking on Thanksgiving Day, November 23,  in the US at #211.
  • NFL (National Football League). The NFL site had its first significant peak on April 29 at #189, the day of the NFL Draft, surpassing even the Super Bowl’s popularity. This peak was matched only by weekends after September 10, when it climbed as high as #160.
  • Flightradar24’s most-trafficked day was April 23, when an American Airlines flight made an emergency landing in Ohio due to an engine fire. It rose to #176 on that day.
  • Waze. The traffic app had lower rankings between June and early September (summer in the Northern Hemisphere), peaking on March 19 at #142 and on October 2 at #145.
  • Tides & Currents. The US Weather Service peaked on August 29-30 at #215 during Hurricane Idalia, described as “an unprecedented event,” as the storm approached Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Wrap up: 2023, shifting AI and e-commerce tides

The Internet plays a role in socializing, entertaining, working, communicating, learning, and staying informed when you most need it. In our popular Internet services rankings, the dominance of giants like Google and Facebook, and the relevance of TikTok and others, underscore the continued influence of established players in shaping online interactions and content consumption. However, the rise of generative AI services, notably OpenAI’s ChatGPT, signals an exciting sector that is rapidly gaining traction. Let’s see where generative AI services can go in 2024.

In the social media realm, X/Twitter seems to be losing some influence in our ranking but continues to be highly influential, and much higher than the direct competition. Mastodon, Threads, and others still have a long way to go to compete. Although not seen as direct microblogging competition, Discord and Reddit continue to show growth.

An emerging player, Temu, made significant strides in the E-commerce realm. In the cryptocurrency space, Binance lost momentum as CoinGecko gained traction. In the gaming and metaverse sectors, the highlights included Roblox’s consistency and Oculus’s growth.

Looking ahead, the trends observed in 2023 set the stage for an even more interconnected and technologically advanced future. The growing importance of AI, the steadfast popularity of social media, and the evolving dynamics in e-commerce and financial services suggest a future where humans will have to continue to adapt to the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

Creating rankings is a team effort that comes with its own challenges and requires careful attention and frequent updates. If you want to help us make these categorical rankings better, you can. Feedback is appreciated, including regarding other categories to include in the 2024 Year in Review.

(Our data scientist, Sabina Zejnilovic, played a crucial role in accurately gathering the Internet services data and contributed to this blog post, as did David Belson with his guidance, along with many others.)

Cyber Week: Analyzing Internet traffic and e-commerce trends

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original http://blog.cloudflare.com/cyber-week-analyzing-internet-traffic-and-e-commerce-trends/


Throughout the year, special events lead to changes in Internet traffic. We observed this with Thanksgiving in the US last week, where traffic dipped, and during periods like Black Friday (November 24, 2023) and Cyber Monday (November 27, 2023), where traffic spiked.

But how significant are these Cyber Week days on the Internet? Is it a global phenomenon? Does e-commerce interest peak on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, and are attacks increasing during this time? These questions are important to retailers and stakeholders around the world. At Cloudflare, we manage substantial traffic for our customers, which gives us a unique vantage from which to analyze traffic and attack patterns across large swaths of the Internet.

As we’ll explore next, we observed varying trends. From a global perspective, there was a clear Internet traffic winner: Cyber Monday was the highest overall traffic day of 2023 (as it was for 2022), followed by Black Friday, and then Monday, November 21 from the same week. But zooming in, this pattern didn’t hold in some countries.

For this analysis, we examined anonymized samples of HTTP requests crossing our network, as well as DNS queries. Cloudflare’s global data shows that peak request traffic occurred on Cyber Monday, and that recent weeks have generally been the year’s busiest. Here are some notable figures:

  • Cloudflare processed a peak of 80 million HTTP requests per second at 16:10 UTC on November 27.
  • The peak hour of 16:00 UTC saw more than 230 billion hourly requests.
  • Cloudflare powered around 4 trillion daily requests on Cyber Monday (with blocked attacks comprising around 5% of all traffic), a figure only approached by Black Friday, which saw 3.86 trillion requests.
  • There was a 27% increase in HTTP requests on Cyber Monday 2023 (November 27) as compared to Cyber Monday 2022 (November 28).

What about DNS queries?

  • Our 1.1.1.1 resolver showed that Cyber Monday 2023 experienced a peak of 1.68 trillion queries per day, with 22 million queries per second around 15:00 UTC. Of these DNS queries, 15% were encrypted (HTTPS and TLS). Back in August, the peak was at 1.35 trillion queries per day, marking a 24% increase.
  • Traffic to our authoritative DNS servers also peaked on Cyber Monday, with 811 billion daily queries and a peak of 9.4 million queries per second around 15:00 UTC.
  • So, during Cyber Monday, we saw a combined peak of over 100 million requests and queries per second across all Cloudflare services at around 16:00 UTC (November 27).

Black Friday week Internet traffic daily ranking

These numbers and trends are consistent with what we observed in 2022 and previous years, where traffic peaks in late November but usually drops in December. Here’s a snapshot of global human Internet traffic this year (bot traffic shows a similar pattern).

Worldwide. Most popular Internet traffic days

  1. Cyber Monday, November 27
  2. Black Friday, November 24
  3. Monday, November 21

From the US perspective, the ranking is similar, with Saturday, November 25, the day after Black Friday, ranking as the third busiest day for Internet traffic.

US. Most popular Internet traffic days

  1. Cyber Monday, November 27
  2. Black Friday, November 24
  3. Saturday, November 25

Additionally, most U.S. states show a similar trend, with Cyber Monday experiencing the most traffic, followed by Black Friday. However, Alaska is a notable exception, where the days with the highest Internet traffic were November 13 and 14, coinciding with a snow emergency that closed schools and roads.

States like Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, New Mexico, and California also had Saturday, November 25, as their second busiest day, but Cyber Monday also “won” there.

Does the Black Friday week impact other countries?

Internationally, a trend of peak Internet traffic in November is observed in most countries, as highlighted in our previous 2022 Year in Review (stay tuned for our 2023 edition in the next few weeks). This trend is likely linked to colder weather in the Northern Hemisphere, where approximately 87% of the world’s population resided in 2023, as well as holidays and shopping periods, among other factors.

Here’s a table summarizing the November days with the most traffic, where the Black Friday week plays a significant role.

Most popular Internet traffic days

UK. 

#1. Black Friday, November 24

#2. Cyber Monday, November 27

#3. Sunday, November 20

Canada. 

#1. Black Friday, November 24

#2. Cyber Monday, November 27

#3. Thursday, November 23

Germany. 

#1. Black Friday, November 24

#2. Sunday, November 26

#3. Cyber Monday, November 27

Mexico. 

#1. Monday, November 21

#2. Friday, November 17 (one week before Black Friday)

#3. Black Friday, November 24

France. 

#1. Cyber Monday, November 27

#2. Sunday, November 26

#3. Black Friday, November 24

Brazil. 

#1. Tuesday, November 22 

#2. Black Friday, November 24

#3. Monday, November 21

Spain. 

#1. Cyber Monday, November 27

#2. Sunday, November 20

#3. Monday, November 21

Australia. 

#1. Black Friday, November 24

#2. Thursday, November 23

#3. Sunday, November 20

Egypt. 

#1. Saturday, November 25

#2. Sunday, November 26

#3. Black Friday, November 24

Singapore. 

#1. Cyber Monday, November 27

#2. Black Friday, November 24

#3. Thursday, November 23

Turkey. 

#1. Sunday, November 26 (Black Friday weekend)

#2. Saturday, November 25

#3. Singles Day, November 11

Philippines. 

#1. Cyber Monday, November 27

#2. Wednesday, November 22

#3. Sunday, November 20

Countries like India, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Indonesia, though they show increased traffic during October and November compared to other months, do not exhibit an obvious increase in traffic during Black Friday week.

Singles’ Day (November 11), a popular Asian shopping event, only features in the top three traffic days in Turkey. In China, October saw bigger traffic peaks than November. However, in November, both Black Friday and the following day (November 25) showed clear increases in traffic, similar to Singles’ Day. In South Africa, Singles’ Day and Black Friday were the busiest traffic days in November, even though October also had higher peaks.

Black Friday goes mobile, Cyber Monday goes desktop

We observed last week that during Thanksgiving Day, mobile use in US Internet traffic was higher than in the previous week. This trend was intensified on Black Friday, peaking at 55.3% of all traffic, surpassing the typical weekend, which usually sees a higher mobile usage percentage. However, on Cyber Monday, desktop use took the lead, with the percentage of mobile device traffic dropping to 47.6%, lower than the previous Monday.

This trend seems to suggest that Black Friday shopping might involve more offline activities, with people in the US using their mobile devices more for Internet access on that day.

Using our 1.1.1.1 resolver, we have a more focused, category-specific view of the DNS traffic growth to e-commerce sites. There’s a general rising trend throughout November, very similar to what we observed in the Internet traffic section.

Looking more closely at the US aggregated e-commerce sites, it’s evident that Cyber Monday and Black Friday, in that order, were the days with the most DNS traffic, with Saturday, November 25, ranking third on the podium — exactly mirroring the HTTP traffic pattern discussed earlier.

The peak hours of DNS traffic on Black Friday were around 16:00 and 17:00 UTC, which correspond to 12:00 and 13:00 EST and 09:00 and 10:00 PST. The same pattern was observed on Cyber Monday.

During Cyber Week (November 20 to 27), there was a 15% increase in DNS traffic compared with the previous week. A consistently high level of DNS traffic was maintained throughout Black Friday week, starting on Monday, November 20, with the sole exception being a noticeable drop on Thanksgiving Day — DNS traffic to e-commerce sites was 6% lower than the previous week on that day.

The UK shows a very similar trend to the US in terms of Black Friday and Cyber Monday interest. However, in 2023, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are tied for the top spot, followed by Tuesday, November 21.

In Australia, Cyber Monday ranked as the most popular day for e-commerce DNS traffic, followed by Black Friday. Canada showed a similar pattern, with Black Friday being the most trafficked day, followed by Cyber Monday.

In Germany, Black Friday indisputably led in e-commerce DNS traffic, followed by the previous Friday, November 17, and then the Black Friday weekend. Cyber Monday did not make it to the top three in Germany.

In France, Black Friday was the most popular e-commerce day, followed by Saturday, November 18.

Focusing on the US only again, electronics e-commerce sites experienced more DNS traffic on Black Friday than on Cyber Monday.

This trend was mirrored in the fast fashion category, with Black Friday clearly in the lead.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that second-hand shopping sites in the US gained more momentum and DNS traffic in the preceding week (November 12-18) leading up to Black Friday. However, these sites then reached their peak on Cyber Monday.

How about cyber threats?

Regarding cyber threats, let’s focus on DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, a popular method for disrupting Internet properties. Data from November 2023 shows that on Thanksgiving, DDoS attacks accounted for the lowest daily fraction of traffic volume observed in the month of November across the US. There were higher percentages of DDoS attacks in late August and September, associated with the HTTP/2 Zero-Day vulnerability, which led to record-breaking attacks.

The Black Friday week was not a peak period for DDoS attacks. The highest activity occurred earlier, mainly in the week of November 6-13.

This pattern is consistent with 2022, where a higher percentage of DDoS attacks was observed before November 21.

Going back to 2023, in terms of potential blocked attacks targeting the “Shopping & General Merchandise” industry, a similar pre-Black Friday week trend is evident. Here we’re including both DDoS and attacks blocked by the Managed Ruleset enforced by Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall, and it’s a global perspective. The peak of 7.3 billion daily HTTP requests occurred during the weekend before Thanksgiving (November 18), coinciding with early Black Friday promotions.

Conclusion

The trends in Internet traffic during events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday highlight a complex pattern of behavior globally and regionally. Cyber Monday leads the way in Internet traffic, closely followed by Black Friday. The trends in the US and UK are similar, but other countries like Germany and France show distinct patterns. The period before Black Friday also gained traction in terms of Internet and e-commerce activity in some countries.

The shift towards mobile usage on Black Friday and desktop dominance on Cyber Monday (in the US) suggests different consumer behaviors, with e-commerce sites experiencing significant DNS traffic increase during these peak shopping periods.

In terms of cybersecurity, while attacks are constant, we observed a lower incidence of DDoS attacks during the Black Friday week in 2023, but there was a clear increase in the two weeks leading up to the most shopping-intense period.

And finally — don’t forget, you can check Cloudflare Radar to track global and country-specific Internet traffic trends.

​​Happy Holidays from everyone at Cloudflare!

Do hackers eat turkey? And other Thanksgiving Internet trends

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original http://blog.cloudflare.com/do-hackers-eat-turkey-and-other-thanksgiving-internet-trends/


Do hackers eat turkey? And other Thanksgiving Internet trends

Thanksgiving is a tradition celebrated by millions of Americans across six time zones and 50 states, usually involving travel and bringing families together. This year, it was celebrated yesterday, on November 23, 2023. With the Internet so deeply enmeshed into our daily lives, anything that changes how so many people behave is going to also have an impact on online traffic. But how big an impact, exactly?

At a high level: a 10% daily decrease in Internet traffic in the US (compared to the previous week). That happens to be the exact same percentage decrease we observed in 2022. So, Thanksgiving in the US, at least in the realm of Internet traffic, seems consistent with last year.

Let’s dig into more details about how people deal with cooking (or online ordering!) and whether family gatherings are less online, according to our Cloudflare Radar data. We’ll also touch on whether hackers stop for turkey, too.

The Thanksgiving hour: around 15:00 (local time)

While we can see a 10% overall daily drop in US traffic due to Thanksgiving, the drop is even more noticeable when examining traffic on an hour-by-hour basis. Internet activity began to decrease significantly after 12:00 EST, persisting until 19:00 EST (during those times, it was at least 15% lower compared to the previous week).

The peak drop for the entire country occurred around 21:00 UTC, which is 16:00 EST and 13:00 PST. That drop represented 22% less traffic than the previous week at the same hour. That’s also the same time and percentage of drop we’ve seen in 2022.

If we continue the country-wide comparison with the previous week, we also see how traffic really begins to pick up again during early Black Friday morning in the US (as much as 18% higher than in the previous week).

However, it’s also interesting to do an analysis of state by state looking at local time. One question we were curious about: from an Internet perspective, what time best represents the Thanksgiving hour? This would be the time when traffic dropped the most in each state.

We find that across states, it’s not exactly 4pm, as The Atlantic has made a case for!, but rather, most states experience the largest drop the hour before — 15:00 local time. But that’s not the only interesting trend! We observe that:

  • Central US states such as Kansas, Iowa, Alabama, or Mississippi apparently had an earlier Thanksgiving — given the biggest drop in traffic was at 13:00.
  • Coastal US states like Washington, California, Florida, Maryland, or Delaware had a later Thanksgiving, around 17:00. There’s also Hawaii, which had the latest of all — experiencing the biggest drop in traffic around 18:00 local time.

What surprised us the most when looking at these trends was how the “Thanksgiving time” was the same from our 2022 data in almost all the states, but also the hourly and daily drop in traffic across the US was mostly the same. It appears that when it comes to Thanksgiving, we are indeed creatures of habit.

The Thanksgiving effect: US states where traffic drop the most

To consider when traffic drops the most, we look between the local time of 13:00-18:00 and compare that to the week before.

This method allows us to observe clear differences between states, with more central US states showing larger drops in traffic compared to the previous week, while coastal states are not as significantly impacted. The exception along the US coast is Massachusetts, which experienced a 31% drop in traffic. East coast states also show a bigger drop in traffic compared to the West coast.

Here’s the ranking of the 50 states (plus DC or the District of Columbia), ordered by the biggest drops in traffic, for those who want to explore our data better:

U.S. State Drop in traffic % Peak Internet traffic drop (local time)
North Dakota -36% 15:00 (CST)
South Dakota -35% 14:00 (CST)
Mississippi -33% 13:00 (CST)
District of Columbia -32% 16:00 (EST)
Oklahoma -32% 14:00 (CST)
Massachusetts -31% 16:00 (EST)
Arkansas -30% 14:00 (CST)
Rhode Island -30% 16:00 (EST)
Kansas -28% 13:00 (CST)
Connecticut -27% 16:00 (EST)
Idaho -27% 16:00 (MST)
New Hampshire -27% 14:00 (EST)
Colorado -26% 16:00 (MST)
Louisiana -25% 14:00 (CST)
Maine -25% 15:00 (EST)
New Mexico -25% 14:00 (MST)
Pennsylvania -25% 16:00 (EST)
Utah -25% 15:00 (MST)
Arizona -24% 16:00 (MST)
Missouri -24% 15:00 (CST)
Maryland -23% 17:00 (EST)
Georgia -22% 16:00 (EST)
Tennessee -22% 14:00 (CST)
Vermont -22% 15:00 (EST)
Delaware -21% 17:00 (EST)
Indiana -21% 15:00 (EST)
Minnesota -21% 15:00 (CST)
New York -21% 16:00 (EST)
Alaska -20% 16:00 (AKST)
Florida -20% 17:00 (EST)
Iowa -20% 13:00 (CST)
Kentucky -20% 14:00 (EST)
Michigan -20% 16:00 (EST)
North Carolina -20% 16:00 (EST)
Texas -20% 15:00 (CST)
Wisconsin -20% 15:00 (CST)
Alabama -19% 13:00 (CST)
Ohio -18% 16:00 (EST)
South Carolina -18% 15:00 (EST)
New Jersey -17% 16:00 (EST)
West Virginia -17% 16:00 (EST)
Illinois -16% 16:00 (CST)
Nebraska -16% 15:00 (CST)
Montana -15% 16:00 (MST)
Washington -15% 17:00 (PST)
California -14% 17:00 (PST)
Nevada -12% 17:00 (PST)
Oregon -12% 15:00 (PST)
Wyoming -10% 16:00 (MST)
Hawaii -9% 18:00 (HST)
Virginia -9% 16:00 (EST)

Mobile traffic percentage goes up

Another, perhaps unsurprising, trend is the rise of mobile devices over the Thanksgiving week in the US. Yesterday, on November 23, mobile traffic accounted for 54.5% of the Internet traffic in the US (the graph below rounds the percentages). It followed a similar trend in 2021 — we published a blog about it — and in 2022, although last year it was at 53.8%.

Looking at the past few weeks, the growth in mobile use in US Internet traffic is more evident. The average percentage of mobile traffic during the first week of November was 47% in the US; during this Thanksgiving week, it reached 51%, with the previously mentioned 54.5% peak on Thanksgiving Day (even higher than the typical weekend, which usually demonstrates more mobile usage).

It’s not just mobile usage that’s going up, though. Over the next few days, we’re expecting to see a surge in traffic to make up for the Thanksgiving lull.

The following chart presents the 2022 perspective on HTTP requests in the US, illustrating how the peak traffic of the year was reached on November 28, Cyber Monday. It’s also notable how Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, followed by January 1, 2023, exhibit the most significant drops in traffic in the US.

Now, let’s explore whether there was an increase in late food delivery or online grocery shopping related to Thanksgiving. Traditionally, this is a time for cooking with family, but not everyone enjoys cooking. DNS traffic (from our 1.1.1.1 resolver) to food delivery sites was higher than the previous week on Tuesday and Wednesday, November 21 and 22, 2023, respectively, but notably dropped in the early morning on Thanksgiving Day.

Daily DNS traffic to food delivery services indicates a gradual increase throughout this month leading up to Thanksgiving Day, followed by a clear drop on the day itself, as much as 12%.

How about online grocery shopping services, catering to those last minute ingredients? DNS traffic to those sites was noticeably higher than the previous week on Tuesday but decreased on Wednesday, experiencing a distinct drop on Thanksgiving Day.

And do hackers stop for turkey, too?

To answer that, let’s examine DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, which remain one of the most common methods to disrupt or take down Internet properties. Our data indicates that in November 2023, Thanksgiving had the lowest percentage of traffic classified as DDoS attacks targeting the US.

Email messages slow down

Cloudflare Area 1 also enables us to analyze email messages sent from the US perspective. Unsurprisingly, our data reveals a 43% drop in email messages sent on Thanksgiving Day compared to the previous week. However, the spam percentage of all emails originating from the US increased to 4%, significantly higher than the 2% recorded on the same day of the previous week.

On the flip side, messages considered malicious stayed consistent in their percentage of all messages.

Conclusion

“The more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for.” — Norman Vincent Peale, American author

Thanksgiving Day in the United States still holds as a strong tradition in 2023, celebrating family, togetherness, and feasting that go beyond state borders and screens. Yet, notable differences exist among states, especially between the coastal and the central areas of the country.

Our data also hints at a slowdown in food deliveries and cyber threats during this time. Perhaps hackers are taking a day off. But, just wait for the story to change on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We’ll keep an eye out.

Thanksgiving 2023 was also the day we announced that Stable Diffusion and Code Llama AI models are now available as part of Workers AI, running in over 100 cities across Cloudflare’s global network. If you’re looking to tinker with some new technology over this holiday weekend, we think you’ll enjoy these!

And finally — don’t forget, you can check Cloudflare Radar to track global and country-specific Internet traffic trends.

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original http://blog.cloudflare.com/internet-traffic-patterns-in-israel-and-palestine-following-the-october-2023-attacks/

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

On Saturday, October 7, 2023, attacks from the Palestinian group Hamas launched from the Gaza Strip against the south of Israel started a new conflict in the region. Israel officially declared that it is at war the next day. Cloudflare's data shows that Internet traffic was impacted in different ways, both in Israel and Palestine, with two networks (autonomous systems) in the Gaza Strip going offline a few hours after the attacks. Subsequently, on October 9, two additional networks also experienced outages. We also saw an uptick in cyberattacks targeting Israel, including a 1.26 billion HTTP requests DDoS attack, and Palestine.

Starting with general Internet traffic trends, there was a clear increase in Internet traffic right after the attacks reportedly began (03:30 UTC, 06:30 local time). Traffic spiked at around 03:35 UTC (06:35 local time) in both Israel (~170% growth compared with the previous week) and Palestine (100% growth).

That growth is consistent with other situations, where we’ve seen surges in Internet traffic when countrywide events occur and people are going online to check for news, updates, and more information on what is happening, with social media and messaging also playing a role. However, in Palestine, that traffic growth was followed by a clear drop in traffic around 08:00 UTC (11:00 local time).

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks
Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

The Palestine uptick in traffic after the Hamas attacks started is more visible when only looking at HTTP requests. Requests in Palestine dropped on Saturday and Sunday, October 7 and 8, as much as 20% and 25%, respectively.

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

Palestine's outages and Internet impact

What drove the drop in Internet traffic in Palestine? Our data shows that two Gaza Strip related networks (autonomous systems or ASNs) were offline on that October 7 morning. Fusion (AS42314) was offline from 08:00 UTC, but saw some recovery after 17:00 UTC the next day; this only lasted for a few hours, given that it went back offline after 12:00 UTC this Monday, October 9.

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

It was the same scenario for DCC North (AS203905), but it went offline after 10:00 UTC and with no recovery of traffic observed as of Monday, October 9. These Internet disruptions may be related to power outages in the Gaza Strip.

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

During the day on October 7, other Palestinian networks saw less traffic than usual. JETNET (AS199046) had around half of the usual traffic after 08:00 UTC, similar to SpeedClick (AS57704), which had around 60% less traffic. After 14:15 on October 9, traffic to those networks dropped sharply (a 95% decrease compared with the previous week), showing only residual traffic.

When looking more closely at the Gaza Strip specifically, we can see that some districts or governorates had a drop in HTTP requests a few hours after the first Hamas attacks. The Gaza Governorate was impacted, with traffic dropping on October 7, 2023, after 09:15 UTC. On October 9, at 18:00 UTC, traffic was 46% lower than in the previous week. (Note: there were spikes in traffic during Friday, October 6, several hours before the attacks, but it is unclear what caused those spikes.)

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

The Deir al-Balah Governorate (on October 9, at 18:00 UTC, traffic was 46% lower than in the previous week) and the Khan Yunis Governorate (50% lower) also both experienced similar drops in traffic:

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks
Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

In the Rafah Governorate traffic dropped after 19:00 UTC on October 8 (and on October 9, at 18:00 UTC, traffic was 65% lower than in the previous week).

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

Other Palestinian governorates in the West Bank did not experience the same impact to Internet traffic.

Spikes in Internet traffic in Israel

In Israel, Internet traffic surged to ~170% as compared to the previous week right after the Hamas attacks on October 7 at around 03:35 UTC (06:35 local time), and again at around 16:00 UTC (19:00 local time), with ~80% growth compared to the previous week. In both cases, the increase was driven by mobile device traffic.

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

There was also increased traffic, as compared with usual levels, on Sunday, October 8, with notable spikes at around 06:00 (09:00 local time) and 12:00 UTC (15:00 local time), seen in the HTTP requests traffic graph below.

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

Mobile device traffic drove the Saturday, October 7 spikes in traffic, with the daily mobile device usage percentage reaching its highest in the past two months, reaching 56%.

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

Looking at specific Israel districts, traffic looks similar to the nationwide perspective.

Cyber attacks targeting Israel

Cyber attacks are frequent, recurrent, and are not necessarily dependent on actual wars on the ground, as our 2023 attacks landscape clearly showed. However, it is not unusual to see cyberattacks launched in tandem with ground assaults. We saw that in Ukraine, an uptick in cyber attacks started just before war began there on February 24, 2022, and were even more constant, and spread to other countries after that day.

In Israel, we saw a clear uptick in cyber attacks earlier this year, with another wave of notable attacks on October 7 and October 8, 2023, after the Hamas attacks. The largest ones were DDoS attacks targeting Israeli newspapers. One attack on October 8, reached 1.26 billion daily requests blocked by Cloudflare as DDoS attacks, and the other reached 346 million daily requests on October 7, and 332 million daily requests the following day.

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

Looking at these DDoS attacks in terms of requests per second, one of the impacted sites experienced a peak of 1.1 million requests per second on October 8 at 02:00 UTC, and the other Israeli newspaper saw a peak of 745k requests per second at around 06:00 the same day.

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

In Palestine, we also saw application layer DDoS attacks, but not as big. The main one in the past three months was on October 7, 2023, targeting a Palestine online newspaper, reaching 105 million daily requests.

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

Looking at these most notable DDoS attacks targeting Palestine in terms of requests per second (rps), the most impacted site (a Palestinian newspaper) experienced a peak of 214k requests per second at around 17:20 UTC on October 7.

Internet traffic patterns in Israel and Palestine following the October 2023 attacks

Follow Cloudflare Radar for up to date information

We will continue to monitor trends related to this conflict. You can use Cloudflare Radar to check for up to date Internet traffic patterns, including those related to Israel and Palestine. Follow Cloudflare Radar on social media at @CloudflareRadar (Twitter/X), cloudflare.social/@radar (Mastodon), and radar.cloudflare.com (Bluesky).

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original http://blog.cloudflare.com/typo-traps-analyzing-traffic-to-exmaple-com-or-is-it-example-com/

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

A typo is one of those common mistakes with unpredictable results when it comes to the Internet’s domain names (DNS). In this blog post we’re going to analyze traffic for exmaple.com, and see how a very simple human error ends up creating unintentional traffic on the Internet.

Cloudflare has owned exmaple.com for a few years now, but don’t confuse it with example.com! example.com is a reserved domain name set by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), under the direction of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It has been used since 1999 as a placeholder, or example, in documentation, tutorials, sample network configurations, or to prevent accidental references to real websites. We use it extensively on this blog.

As I’m writing it, the autocorrect system transforms exmaple.com into example.com, every time, assuming I must have misspelled it. But in situations where there’s no automatic spelling correction (for example, while editing a configuration file) it’s easy for example to become exmaple.

And so, lots of traffic goes to exmaple.com by mistake — whether it was a typoed attempt to reach example.com or due to other random reasons. Fake email accounts in marketing forms are among these reasons (more details below). This phenomenon of "typosquatting" is used by attackers hoping someone misspells the name of a known brand, as we saw in March in our blog “Top 50 most impersonated brands in phishing attacks and new tools you can use to protect your employees from them”. Random typos that cause networks (big or small) problems have also been around for a while.

Here is what the example.com web page shows to a user who goes directly to that domain name:

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

And this is what exmaple.com looks like:

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

A bit of exmaple.com history

exmaple.com came to us a few years ago from a customer. He registered the domain to prevent malicious exploitation, but got tired of dealing with more traffic than expected — it’s not the first time that this has happened (icanhazip.com was another similar example). Too much traffic does come at a financial cost. So, why would a domain name like exmaple.com, that is not promoted anywhere, have traffic? It shows how unintentional traffic is a real thing with the right domain name. It could also be a result of a typo in network configurations or a misconfigured router, as we’re going to see next.

Let’s explore, then, what traffic goes to exmaple.com by answering some questions.

How much traffic does it get?

It gets much more traffic than one would expect in terms of HTTP requests, given that it is mostly used because someone or a system/router set by someone, misspelled example.com. In terms of bytes, the numbers are minimal, as this is a very simple site with only a short text sentence, as shown above. Usually, on a daily basis, it doesn’t go over 1 Mbps. In a 12-month period (May 2022-June 2023), it had 2.48 billion HTTP requests, but it has been increasing over recent months. In April 2023, it was 243 million requests, an 8.13 million daily average, against a 6.07 million daily average in June 2022.

What type of traffic is it? Almost all HTTP traffic that goes to exmaple.com is categorized as bot-related. That’s around 99.99%: 2.48 billion requests were from bots, 110,000 were not from bots, and 40,000 we weren’t able to categorize. This already gives us some information, showing that the majority of traffic is not a typical user simply adding exmaple.com by mistake to some documentation or tutorial. This is mostly automated traffic (more on that below).

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

There are also a few peaks worth mentioning. There’s a clear spike in bot traffic on December 8 and 9, 2022 (11.8 and 11.85 million requests, respectively), the week after Cyber Monday week.

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

From which countries are requests coming from? The top countries include France, Japan, Germany, and the US. Below, we’re going to check why this happens by looking at the autonomous system (ASNs) perspective. Never forgetting that connected networks or AS’s make up the Internet.

How about HTTP protocols?

In terms of the HTTP protocols, the majority uses unencrypted HTTP only, accounting for 76% of all requests, while HTTPS represents 24%. That is actually unusual in the modern day Internet. As Cloudflare Radar data shows, excluding bots, HTTPS represents 99.3% of all requests in a general Cloudflare perspective, and its 80.8% of HTTPS for bots-only traffic. HTTPS adds a layer of security (SSL/TLS encryption), ensuring data remains confidential.

HTTP is definitely more used by automated traffic, given that HTTPS is more used for human consumption, as browsers tend to prioritize HTTPS. Only 6% of human-related requests use HTTP (the rest is HTTPS). That HTTP percentage jumps to 76%, when considering automated requests-only.

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

Is exmaple.com the target of cyber attacks?

The short answer is yes. But it’s a very low percentage of requests that are mitigated. The biggest spike in application layer attacks was on December 9, 2022, with 560k HTTP daily requests categorized as DDoS attacks. Nothing of large scale, but that said, small attacks can also take down under-protected sites. WAF mitigations had a 10k spike on November 2, 2022.

Generating the most traffic: a French ISP

What drives most of the traffic are very specific ASNs. In this case, the dominant one is one of France's main Internet operators, Bouygues Telecom. Its AS5410 is generating the most traffic to exmaple.com, followed by Google Cloud, in Japan. Bouygues Telecom traffic to exmaple.com means more than three million daily requests at least since February 2023. Here’s the AS5410 over time traffic:

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

We contacted Bouygues Telecom to let them know a couple of weeks ago, and shared information about where we were seeing traffic from. So far, they haven’t found the needle in the haystack sending traffic to exmaple.com, potentially related to some erroneous configuration.

And since, exmaple.com is not a malicious site, so there’s no harm, no foul. However, one could wonder what might happen if this were a malicious domain. Identifying and resolving misconfigurations is important for network administrators to ensure efficient and secure network operations.

There are a few other ASN-related oddities. A major spike in traffic on December 8, 2022, with 5.84 million HTTP requests on a single day, came from the Netherlands-based AS49981, Worldstream (an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider). And on March 28-29, 2023, it was Russian Rostelecom AS12389, with a double spike of around 1.8 million requests per day. On June 18, 2022, it was German Deutsche Telekom AS3320, and on May 6, 2022, there was a 2.31 million HTTP requests daily spike from Bell Canada’s ISP, AS577, just to mention those with clearer spikes.

Here is the list that associates countries with the ASNs that are generating more traffic to exmaple.com:

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

Why does this happen in specific ASNs in different regions of the world, you may ask? Even without a definitive answer, the amount of daily traffic from those ASNs, and the prevalence of bot traffic, seems to indicate that most traffic is related to a possible misconfiguration in a router, software or network setting, intended to go to example.com.

As we observed previously, example.com is used for testing, educational, or illustrative purposes, including in routers from specific networks. It could be for network troubleshooting and testing, training, simulations, or it also could be in the documentation or guides for configuring routers, as examples to illustrate how to set up DNS configurations, route advertisement, or other networking settings.

What are the main IP versions and browsers?

Regarding IP versions, they can be IPv4 or IPv6 — v6 emerged as a solution when the initial v4 wasn't prepared for the Internet's growth. For exmaple.com unique visitors, looking at the daily number of unique IPs where requests originate, IPv6 has been rising in comparison to IPv4. This suggests that IPv6 is now more frequently used by the services and bots generating most of this traffic. It started in May at 30% IPv6 usage and is now around 50%.

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

The user-agent header sent by the visitor's web browser in the HTTP request typically contains information about the used browser, operating system, and sometimes even the device. But in this case, the user-agent information doesn’t give us much detail, even of there’s some odd ones. “Empty” (when user agents are absent) comes first, followed by “Mozilla/5.0” and “Go-http-client/2.0”. What do those user-agents mean?

  • The user agent string "Mozilla/5.0" is widely used by a variety of web browsers, both mainstream and niche, including Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera. Therefore, it is challenging to attribute the usage of "Mozilla/5.0" specifically to a single browser or user category. While "Mozilla/5.0" is associated with legitimate browsers, it's worth noting that user agent strings can be easily manipulated or forged by bots and malicious actors.
  • “Go-http-client/2.0” indicates that the request is coming from a program or application written in the Go programming language (often referred to as Golang).

There are also a few others represented with known meanings, such as “curl/7.66.0” (the numbers correspond to the specific version being used). This user agent string indicates that the HTTP request was made using the cURL command-line tool, a popular tool used for tasks like downloading files, automated testing, debugging, or server monitoring. There’s also “Lavf/59.27.100”, a less common user agent tied to FFmpeg's Lavf library for multimedia tasks, and “python-requests/2.28.1”, that indicates the use of the Python Requests library, popular for sending HTTP requests and interacting with web services.

In the camp of more unusual user agents, with a few thousand requests, are instances like a specific GitHub page (a software library called Typhoeus) or a possible “script for checking if job exists” for the job searching site vercida.com.

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

From where did the users access the website? Let's examine the distribution of HTTP referrers. Note that the term "referer" is based on a misspelling in the original specification that has persisted (it should be "referrer header" instead) in HTTP — in the original HTTP proposal Tim Berners-Lee spells it “referrer” as well. The referer or referrer header is an optional field that provides information about the URL of the web page from which a particular request originated.

The predominant “referer” used is “empty”, which occurs when a user agent isn’t provided, also possibly meaning direct access or by bookmark. Next is exmaple.com itself (an unusual pattern, given there are no links on exmaple.com), with a peak of 160,000 requests on February 6, 2023. Following that is a curious spike of 10,000 requests from "reddit.com" on January 30, 2023, possibly due to a misspelling of example.com in a Reddit post that got popular.

We didn’t find a specific Reddit post from January 30 mentioning exmaple.com, but there were a few there over the years, clearly aiming to show example.com. Some of those are as recent as one year or even 10 months, like this Reddit post on the AWS subreddit, or this one from January 31, 2023, related to SEO.

On that note, regarding human misuse of misconfigurations impacting the Internet, in 2018, a member of the Cloudflare team gave a presentation about “Internet Noise” during a RIPE event that can be consulted here. It’s about unwanted traffic due to misconfigurations and misuse of proxies and internal use situations.

Although no email address online intentionally targets exmaple.com, that address still gets some email attention. We configured a Gmail account to monitor these random emails in early 2022. Within 16 months, the 15 GB email capacity was fully used, containing 216,000 emails — an average of 432 daily emails. These emails reflect various scenarios: some are marketing-related, others appear to be network tests, and some are from individuals who, by error or to avoid spam, ended up at “@exmaple.com”. Among these use cases, we noticed accounts linked to PlayStation, Apple devices, Pandora music, Facebook, and more.

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)
What the exmaple.com Inbox typically looks like.

Examining a 30-day span of emails (late July to late August), we noticed that certain types of emails are more common than others. This is notably seen in tests conducted by computer software applications that monitor systems, networks, and infrastructure. The main example of this is Nagios.

Since late July, nearly 83% of almost 4,000 emails were from Nagios. The sender used a “local domain” from Nagios, and the email address was “[email protected]”—where example.com was likely the intended recipient. The subjects alternated between “PROBLEM Service Alert: [Name of company] ATM/PING is WARNING” and “RECOVERY Service Alert: [Name of company]_Backup/PING is OK”, indicating service tests.

Analyzing the regions where most emails originate (based on our data centers), it's evident that North America and Southeast Asia are the primary sources, along with Europe. Regarding languages, English dominates, but some emails are in German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Russian.

Microsoft (56 emails), Apple (30), and Google (20 emails) are in the mix. Surprisingly, emails from various golf courses (31 emails from eight different golf courses) were also present, along with emails from cruise ship companies. Additionally, there are emails from well-known brands such as Call of Duty, PlayStation, HP, Uber (related to Uber Eats), McAfee, and even the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (in newsletter subscription emails) that were observed (in this case, from the actual brands and not spam look alike). While Facebook-related emails were present in previous months, they haven't been seen recently.

Some emails clearly reveal their "fake" email intent, like “[email protected]”, sent by a virtual learning platform, likely when someone provided a randomly false email address. There are also repeated instances of people’s names like Mike or others, including surnames, before “@exmaple.com”. This suggests that people use the same fictitious email address when asked for their email by companies.

Here are some of the most creatively formed or interesting email addresses provided between July and August 2023, organized by us based on types of chosen email addresses (we included the number of emails in the most frequently used ones):

[email protected] — our favorite [email protected] — 35 emails
[email protected] — 20 [email protected] — 25
[email protected] — 17 [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected] — (we removed two letters for obvious reasons)
[email protected] — 3200 (used by a software company) [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected] — 11
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected] — 5
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected] — 20
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] — 14 [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] — 15 [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected] — 10
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected] — (“daufrecht” means upright in German)
[email protected] [email protected]
[email protected]

Email authentication. DMARC and friends

In the realm of email, DMARC (that stands for "Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance") is a security protocol that helps prevent email spoofing and phishing attacks by providing a framework. It is used by email senders to authenticate their messages and receivers to verify their authenticity. DMARC is based on both SPF (verifies if an email was sent by an authorized sender) and DKIM (the receiving server will check the DKIM-Signature header), and the domains used by those two protocols. So, DMARC requires that SPF or DKIM “pass”.

The implementation of DMARC signals that an email sender is taking measures to improve email security and protect their domain's reputation. With this context, let’s delve into DMARC validation. How did these random email senders to “@exmaple.com”? Only 11% (433) of all emails (3890) from the past 30 days passed the DMARC authentication successfully, most of those were from recognized senders like Apple, Uber, or Microsoft.

This is also because a significant 83% (3252) of emails originated from what appear to be tests conducted by computer software applications that monitor systems, networks, and infrastructure — specifically, Nagios. All of these emails are categorized as "none" in terms of DMARC policies, indicating that the sender is not using a DMARC policy. This approach is frequently adopted as an initial phase to gauge the impact of DMARC policies before adopting more robust measures. Just 1% of all emails "failed" DMARC authentication, implying that these emails didn't align with the sender's designated policies.

In such instances, domain owners can instruct email providers to take actions such as quarantining the email or outright rejection, thus shielding recipients from potentially malicious messages. This was evident in domains like amazon.co.jp or sanmateo.flester.com (where "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" messages originated from the Mail Delivery System).

Our email perspective could have been even more comprehensive if this “@exmaple.com” email account had Cloudflare Area 1 — our cloud-native email security service that detects and thwarts attacks before they reach user inboxes. Perhaps in a future geeky venture, we will also incorporate that viewpoint, complete with percentages for spam, malicious content, and threat categories.

Where is example.com on our domain popularity ranking? What about exmaple.com?

Last but not least, we also have insight into example.com itself. Looking at our most popular domains list (using data from our 1.1.1.1 resolver), example.com or “example.org” are no strangers to our popular domains ranking. Those two are usual “guests” of our top 500 domains ranking, both worldwide and in specific countries, which also is an expression of its popularity and usage for all the use cases we already discussed. example.com usually sits higher, in the top 300. Since July, it has even appeared in our top 100 for the first time in 2023.

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

exmaple.com, on the other hand, is not in our top 100 list, and only appears in our top 100k top domains list. You can find our domains lists, including a top 100, and unordered CSV lists up to Top 1 million domains, on Cloudflare Radar and through our API.

Just by checking DNS data from those who use our resolver, the original example.com gets around 2.6 billion DNS queries every day. This number has been consistently increasing since 2022, more than doubling. Here's the chart to show it:

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

What about exmaple.com? DNS queries are significantly lower by an order of magnitude. On average, it receives around 40,000 DNS queries per day, with occasional spikes reaching 80,000 to 90,000 — there’s one 160k July 23, 2022, spike. It's also noteworthy that there are more DNS queries on weekdays and fewer on weekends, which is not the case for example.com.

Typo traps: analyzing traffic to exmaple.com (or is it example.com?)

Conclusion: Errare humanum est

“Some of the worst problems that happen on the Internet are not because somebody deliberately caused the problem. It’s because somebody made a mistake. We’ve lost half the networks ability to transport traffic or route it to the right destinations because somebody made a configuration mistake”.
Vint Cerf, American Internet pioneer, in a 2016’s article: Vinton G. Cerf: Human error, not hackers threaten Net.

Even if traffic to exmaple.com arrives without consequences, a typo from a technician in a device for the wrong and malicious domain, could definitely have a negative impact if protections are not put in place. The typical Internet user is also susceptible to sending emails to the wrong address due to typos or could be tricked by domains resembling popular brands, but with errors.

Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome Lucius Seneca stated two thousand years ago, Errare humanum est or in plain English: to err is human. This held true for humans in the year AD 30 and remains so for humans in 2023. And the Internet, the complex network of networks that has grown larger than even its human inventors anticipated, is no stranger of these human errors, and its consequences. Quoting once again from Vint Cerf, “we need to have much better tools for writing software to avoid some of those stupid mistakes that cause problems in the Internet”.

After all this geeky analysis, my autocorrect finally recognizes "exmaple.com" and doesn't change it to "example.com". Success.

(Thanks to Jorge Pacheco, Sofia Cardita, Jérôme Fleury, and Marek Majkowski for their contributions to this blog post.)

Cloudflare Radar’s 2023 overview of new tools and insights

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-radars-2023-overview-of-new-tools-and-insights/

Cloudflare Radar’s 2023 overview of new tools and insights

Cloudflare Radar’s 2023 overview of new tools and insights

Cloudflare Radar was launched in September 2020, almost three years ago, when the pandemic was affecting Internet traffic usage. It is a free tool to show Internet usage patterns from both human and automated systems, as well as attack trends, top domains, and adoption and usage of browsers and protocols. As Cloudflare has been publishing data-driven insights related to the general Internet for more than 10 years now, Cloudflare Radar is a natural evolution.

This year, we have introduced several new features to Radar, also available through our public API, that enables deeper data exploration. We’ve also launched an Internet Quality section, a Trending Domains section, a URL Scanner tool, and a Routing section to track network interconnection, routing security, and observed routing anomalies.

In this reading list, we want to highlight some of those new additions, as well as some of the Internet disruptions and trends we’ve observed and published posts about during this year, including the war in Ukraine, the impact of Easter, and exam-related shutdowns in Iraq and Algeria.

We also encourage everyone to explore Cloudflare Radar and its new features, and to give you a partial review of the year, in terms of Internet insights — our 2023 Year in Review is coming later this year.

New additions to Cloudflare Radar

In 2022, Cloudflare Radar 2.0 was released last September, refreshing the look & feel and building on a new platform that allows us to easily add new features in the future. At that time, we added two new sections:

Cloudflare Radar’s 2022 Year in Review and the related blog were published at the end of the year.

Without further ado, here are some of the new features launched in 2023.

Analyze any URL safely using the Cloudflare Radar URL Scanner (✍️)

If you're invited to click on a link and if you're unsure about its safety, or if you simply want to verify technical details about a particular site, URL Scanner is here to assist. Provide us with a URL, and our scanner will compile a report containing a myriad of technical details: risk assessment, SSL certificate data, HTTP request and response data, page performance data, DNS records, associated cookies, what technologies and libraries the page uses, and more.

Introducing the Cloudflare Radar Internet Quality Page (✍️)

In June 2023, the new Internet Quality page was introduced to Cloudflare Radar, offering both country and network (autonomous system) level insight. This provides information on Internet connection performance (bandwidth) and quality (latency, jitter) over time based on benchmark test data as well as speed.cloudflare.com test results.

You can also see in a world map how the different countries compare with each other in different metrics from bandwidth to latency and jitter. Autonomous systems (AS) or networks are presented on individual pages, including Starlink’s AS14593. Latency is the metric that gives a better perspective on quality and improved Internet experience. Here’s the most recent global view on latency-based connection quality (lower is better):

Cloudflare Radar’s 2023 overview of new tools and insights

Starting July 2023, our Domain Rankings page received enhancements through the inclusion of specific Trending Domains lists. While the top 100 list is typically dominated by the big names such as Google, Facebook, and Apple, there are trending domains that also tell interesting and even more local stories.

The Trending Domains lists highlight surges in interest from the previous day and previous week. For instance, we captured how nba.com was trending in 28 locations during the NBA Draft 2023, and how rt.com (a Russian-based news site) gained attention in multiple countries during the Wagner group mutiny in Russia. More recently, on the same subject, after the death of Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in a plane crash, flightradar24.com was trending in our daily list both in Russia and Ukraine.

Routing information now on Cloudflare Radar (✍️)

The Internet is a vast, sprawling collection of networks (autonomous systems) that connect to each other, and routing is one of the most critical operations of the Internet. Launched in late July 2023, the new Cloudflare Radar Routing page examines the routing status of the Internet, including secure routing protocol deployment for a country and routing changes and anomalies. Included are routing security statistics, and also announced prefixes and connectivity insights. Why is that important? Routing decides how and where the Internet traffic should flow from the source to the destination, and deviations or anomalies can indicate potential issues that lead to connectivity disruptions.

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), is considered the postal service of the Internet, but as a routing protocol suffers from a number of security weaknesses. Within the Routing page, we also present BGP route leaks and BGP hijack detection results, highlighting relevant events detected for any given network or globally. Notably, BGP origin hijacks allow attackers to intercept, monitor, redirect, or drop traffic destined for the victim's networks. In this related blog post, we also explain how Cloudflare built its BGP hijack detection system (including notifications), from its design and implementation to its integration: Cloudflare Radar's new BGP origin hijack detection system.

Cloudflare Radar’s 2023 overview of new tools and insights

General Internet insights from 2023

This blog post details Internet insights during the war in Europe and discusses how Ukraine's Internet remained resilient in spite of dozens of attacks and disruptions in three different stages of the conflict.

Cloudflare observed multiple Internet disruptions in the first weeks of the war (Internet infrastructure was damaged, and Internet access was limited in besieged areas, like Mariupol), as well as airstrikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. We also emphasize how application-layer cyber attacks in Ukraine rose 1,300% in early March 2022 as compared to pre-war levels, the country’s Internet resilience during the war, and major growth in Starlink traffic from the country.

Cloudflare’s view of the Virgin Media outage in the UK (✍️)

At times, major Internet operators experience significant outages due to technical issues. In 2022, it was Canada’s Rogers that experienced a 17-hour disruption impacting millions of users, and in early April 2023, a similar incident occurred with the United Kingdom’s Virgin Media. In this case, there were two clear outages for a few hours during April 4, 2023.

The post examines the impact on Internet traffic, the availability of Virgin Media web properties, and how BGP activity offered insights into the root cause.

National holidays celebrated in various countries can influence local Internet traffic trends. That was the case during Easter, celebrated between April 7-10, 2023. In countries including Italy, Poland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, the United States, Mexico, and Australia, the Easter long weekend led to the lowest traffic levels of 2023 up to that point—over 100 days into the year. Traffic dipped most significantly on Easter Sunday, compared to the previous Sunday, in Poland (22% lower), Italy (18% lower), France (16% lower).

The post also illustrates Orthodox Easter trends, with Greece being most impacted. It examines Ramadan-related changes, where eating rituals impacted Internet patterns in several countries with significant Muslim populations, and Passover trends, showing how Israel’s Internet traffic dropped as much as 24%.

Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns (✍️)

We’ve been monitoring changes and disruptions in Internet patterns linked to military interventions. In this Sudan-related blog post, we analyze the impact of the armed conflict between rival factions of the military government that began on April 15, 2023. Cloudflare observed varying disruptions in Internet traffic after that day, with a mix of clear outages and general decrease in traffic.

The country’s Internet continues to be impacted ever since, as our 12-month traffic graph illustrates, with the relevant Sudatel, Mobitel, and MTN autonomous systems from local ISPs remaining the most affected.

The most recent Internet pattern change linked to military intervention is the ongoing coup in Niger. This particular event caused a distinct traffic drop, likely tied to shifts in human Internet usage, given the absence of signs of consistent connectivity disruption.

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic (✍️)

As the coronation ceremony of King Charles III unfolded in London on May 6, 2023, distinct spikes and dips in Internet traffic were observed, each coinciding with key moments of the event. Also, on Sunday during the Coronation Big Lunch event, and Prince William’s speech at night, both instances led to a clear traffic drop of up to 18% compared with the previous Sunday. The accompanying chart displays this trend.

Cloudflare Radar’s 2023 overview of new tools and insights

During the coronation weekend, Canada and Australia also exhibited shifts in Internet traffic patterns. And within this coronation post, there’s also analysis on Internet traffic pattern changes when Queen Elizabeth II passed away on September 8, 2022.

Cloudflare’s view of Internet disruptions in Pakistan (✍️)

Following the arrest of ex-PM Imran Khan, violent protests led the Pakistani government to order the shutdown of mobile Internet services and blocking of social media platforms. Mobile network shutdowns in the country lasted for several days.

We examined the impact of these shutdowns on Internet traffic in Pakistan and traffic to Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver and how Pakistanis appeared to be using it in an attempt to maintain access to the open Internet.

Nine years of Project Galileo and how the last year has changed it (✍️)

For the ninth anniversary of our Project Galileo in June 2023, the focus turned towards providing access to affordable cybersecurity tools and sharing our learnings from protecting the most vulnerable communities. We also published a ninth anniversary Project Galileo report.

One of the highlights of the report was a clear DDoS attack targeting an organization related to international law. This incident occurred on the same day an international arrest warrant was issued for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian official Maria Lvova-Belova, on March 17, 2023. Another standout observation involved the spikes in traffic experienced by Ukrainian emergency and humanitarian services, coinciding with bombings within the country.

Since early June 2023, we’ve seen Iraq implementing a series of multi-hour shutdowns that continued through July and into August, as documented in our Outage Center. Algeria took similar actions, but using a content blocking-based approach, instead of the wide-scale Internet shutdowns, to prevent cheating on baccalaureate exams. This summer, these exam-related shutdowns were also  implemented in Syria.

Cloudflare has previously observed and reported on similar occurrences in 2022 and also in 2021, in Syria and Sudan.

Cloudflare Radar’s 2023 overview of new tools and insights
2023 has been a busy year for different types of Internet disruptions and outages, from government-directed shutdowns to natural incidents.

Reports: DDoS, Internet disruptions, and application security

Within Cloudflare Radar’s reports section, you will find a diverse array of perspectives on the Internet. From the Project Galileo 9th Anniversary — focused on aiding significant yet vulnerable online voices — to the more recent Q2 2023 Browsers and Search Engines reports. Some reports, such as the DDoS attack trends one, are also blog posts. Others are only available as blog posts, like the Internet disruptions summary, expanding on entries in the Outage Center, and the Application Security report.

Q2 2023 Internet disruption summary (✍️)

This post delves into Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the second quarter of 2023. Since 2022, we have been consistently offering these quarterly overviews of disruptions, and Q2 proved to be a busy quarter, with different types of disruptions:

  • There were several government directed shutdowns, including the ones related to “exam season” in several Middle Eastern and African countries, that continue through August.
  • Severe weather also played a role with a “Super Typhoon”-related disruption on the US territory of Guam.
  • Cable damage was behind disruptions in Bolivia, the Gambia and the Philippines.
  • Power outage-related Internet disruptions were observed in Curaçao, Portugal, and Botswana.
  • More generic technical problems impacted SpaceX Starlink’s satellite service, and Virgin Media in the United Kingdom.
  • Cyberattacks played a role in disruptions in both Russia and Ukraine.
  • Military action-related outages were observed in Chad and Sudan.
  • There were also maintenance related outages that affected Togo, Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), and Burkina Faso.

The Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2023 included another cause, a massive earthquake. The early February 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Turkey, which also affected Syria, caused widespread damage and tens of thousands of fatalities, and resulted in significant disruptions to Internet connectivity in multiple regions for several weeks.

DDoS threat report for 2023 Q2 (✍️)

Since 2020, our DDoS reports/blog posts have been focused on uncovering new attack trends, identifying the most affected countries, and showing targeted industries. Our Q2 2023 DDoS threats blog post highlights an unprecedented escalation in DDoS attack sophistication. Pro-Russian hacktivists REvil, Killnet, and Anonymous Sudan joined forces to attack Western sites. Exploits related to the zero-day vulnerability known as TP240PhoneHome surged by a whopping 532%, and attacks on crypto rocketed up by 600%.

An associated interactive version of this report is available on Cloudflare Radar. Furthermore, we’ve also added a new interactive component to Radar’s security section that allows you to dive deeper into attack activity in each country or region.

Our previous 2023 Q1 DDoS threat report highlighted a record-breaking hyper volumetric 71 million requests per second (rps) attack.

Application Security Report: Q2 2023  (✍️)

Our Application Security report has been around since 2022. The latest one highlights new attack trends and insights visible through Cloudflare’s global network. Some highlights include:

  • Daily mitigated HTTP requests decreased by 2 percentage points to 6% on average from 2021 to 2022, but days with larger than usual malicious activity were clearly seen across the network.
  • Application owners are increasingly relying on geo location blocks.
  • Old CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) are still exploited en masse. In that regard, also in August 2023, we also published a “Unmasking the top exploited vulnerabilities of 2022” analysis.
  • On average, more than 10% of non-verified bot traffic is mitigated. Compared to the last report, non-verified bot HTTP traffic mitigation is currently on a downward trend (down 6 percentage points).
  • 65% of global API traffic is generated by browsers.
  • HTTP Anomalies are the most common attack vector on API endpoints, with 64%, followed by SQLi injection attacks (11%) and XSS attacks (9%).

For a comprehensive overview of online attacks and security in 2023, you can also explore the post titled “An August reading list about online security and 2023 attacks landscape”.

Wrap up

The network of networks, also known as the Internet, is both complex and already seen as a human basic right—enabling work, leisure, communication, knowledge acquisition, and the pursuit of opportunities.

In 2023, Cloudflare Radar introduced new capabilities that facilitate the exploration of a broader array of insights and trends showing the Internet's various facets. These include Internet quality, insights into trending domains, and pertinent routing changes. There’s also no lack of general Internet insights and reports that try to offer different perspectives on 2023 events and occurrences and their impact. And already in August 2023, we’ve launched the “date picker” functionality, allowing any user to go back in time by selecting arbitrary date ranges. It looks like this:

Cloudflare Radar’s 2023 overview of new tools and insights

Visit Cloudflare Radar for additional insights around (Internet disruptions, routing issues, Internet traffic trends, attacks, Internet quality, etc.). Follow us on social media at @CloudflareRadar (Twitter), cloudflare.social/@radar (Mastodon), and radar.cloudflare.com (Bluesky), or contact us via e-mail.

An August reading list about online security and 2023 attacks landscape

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original http://blog.cloudflare.com/an-august-reading-list-about-online-security-and-2023-attacks-landscape/

An August reading list about online security and 2023 attacks landscape

An August reading list about online security and 2023 attacks landscape

In 2023, cybersecurity continues to be in most cases a need-to-have for those who don’t want to take chances on getting caught in a cyberattack and its consequences. Attacks have gotten more sophisticated, while conflicts (online and offline, and at the same time) continue, including in Ukraine. Governments have heightened their cyber warnings and put together strategies, including around critical infrastructure (including health and education). All of this, at a time when there were never so many online risks, but also people online — over five billion in July 2023, 64.5% of the now eight billion that are the world’s total population.

Here we take a look at what we’ve been discussing in 2023, so far, in our Cloudflare blog related to attacks and online security in general, with several August reading list suggestions. From new trends, products, initiatives or partnerships, including AI service safety, to record-breaking blocked cyberattacks. On that note, our AI hub (ai.cloudflare.com) was just launched.

Throughout the year, Cloudflare has continued to onboard customers while they were being attacked, and we have provided protection to many others, including once.net, responsible for the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest online voting system — the European event reached 162 million people.

Our global network — a.k.a. Supercloud — gives us a unique vantage point. Cloudflare’s extensive scale also helps enhance security, with preventive services powered by machine learning, like our recent WAF attack scoring system to stop attacks before they become known or even malware.

Recently, we announced our presence in more than 300 cities across over 100 countries, with interconnections to over 12,000 networks and still growing. We provide services for around 20% of websites online and to millions of Internet properties.

Attacks increasing. A readiness and trust game

Let’s start with providing some context. There are all sorts of attacks, but they have been, generally speaking, increasing. In Q2 2023, Cloudflare blocked an average of 140 billion cyber threats per day. One year ago, when we wrote a similar blog post, it was 124 billion, a 13% increase year over year. Attackers are not holding back, with more sophisticated attacks rising, and sectors such as education or healthcare as the target.

Artificial intelligence (AI), like machine learning, is not new, but it has been trending in 2023, and certain capabilities are more generally available. This has raised concerns about the quality of deception and even AI hackers.

This year, governments have also continued to release reports and warnings. In 2022, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) created the Shields Up initiative in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In March 2023, the Biden-Harris Administration released the National Cybersecurity Strategy aimed at securing the Internet.

The UK’s Cyber Strategy was launched at the end of 2022, and in March of this year, a strategy was released to specifically protect its National Health Service (NHS) from cyber attacks — in May it was time for the UK’s Ministry of Defence to do the same. In Germany, the new Digital Strategy is from 2022, but the Security Strategy arrived in June. A similar scenario is seen in Japan, Australia, and others.

That said, here are the reading suggestions related to more general country related attacks, but also policy and trust cybersecurity:

This blog post reports on Internet insights during the war in Europe, and discusses how Ukraine's Internet remained resilient in spite of dozens of attacks, and disruptions in three different stages of the conflict.

An August reading list about online security and 2023 attacks landscape
Application-layer cyber attacks in Ukraine rose 1,300% in early March 2022 compared to pre-war levels.

The White House’s National Cybersecurity Strategy asks the private sector to step up to fight cyber attacks. Cloudflare is ready (✍️)

The White House released in March 2023 the National Cybersecurity Strategy aimed at preserving and extending the open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and securing the Internet. Cloudflare welcomed the Strategy, and the much-needed policy initiative, highlighting the need of defending critical infrastructure, where Zero Trust plays a big role. In the same month, Cloudflare announced its commitment to the 2023 Summit for Democracy. Also related to these initiatives, in March 2022, we launched our very own Critical Infrastructure Defense Project (CIDP), and in December 2022, Cloudflare launched Project Safekeeping, offering Zero Trust solutions to certain eligible entities in Australia, Japan, Germany, Portugal and the United Kingdom.

Secure by default: recommendations from the CISA’s newest guide, and how Cloudflare follows these principles to keep you secure (✍️)

In this April 2023 post we reviewed the “default secure” posture, and recommendations that were the focus of a recently published guide jointly authored by several international agencies. It had US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, and New Zealand contributions. Long story short, using all sorts of tools, machine learning and a secure-by-default and by-design approach, and a few principles, will make all the difference.

Nine years of Project Galileo and how the last year has changed it (✍️) + Project Galileo Report (✍️)

For the ninth anniversary of our Project Galileo in June 2023, the focus turned towards providing access to affordable cybersecurity tools and sharing our learnings from protecting the most vulnerable communities. There are also Project Galileo case studies and how it has made a difference, including to those in education and health, cultural, veterans’ services, Internet archives, and investigative journalism. A Cloudflare Radar Project Galileo report was also disclosed, with some highlights worth mentioning:

  • Between July 1, 2022, and May 5, 2023, Cloudflare mitigated 20 billion attacks against organizations protected under Project Galileo. This is an average of nearly 67.7 million cyber attacks per day over the last 10 months.
  • For LGBTQ+ organizations, we saw an average of 790,000 attacks mitigated per day over the last 10 months, with a majority of those classified as DDoS attacks.
  • Attacks targeting civil society organizations are generally increasing. We have broken down an attack aimed at a prominent organization, with the request volume climbing as high as 667,000 requests per second. Before and after this time the organization saw little to no traffic.
  • In Ukraine, spikes in traffic to organizations that provide emergency response and disaster relief coincide with bombings of the country over the 10-month period.

Project Cybersafe Schools: bringing security tools for free to small K-12 school districts in the US (✍️)

Already in August 2023, Cloudflare introduced an initiative aimed at small K-12 public school districts: Project Cybersafe Schools. Announced as part of the Back to School Safely: K-12 Cybersecurity Summit at the White House on August 7, Project Cybersafe Schools will support eligible K-12 public school districts with a package of Zero Trust cybersecurity solutions — for free, and with no time limit. In Q2 2023, Cloudflare blocked an average of 70 million cyber threats each day targeting the U.S. education sector, and a 47%  increase in DDoS attacks quarter-over-quarter.

Privacy concerns also go hand in hand with security online, and we’ve provided further details on this topic earlier this year in relation to our investment in security to protect data privacy. Cloudflare also achieved a new EU Cloud Code of Conduct privacy validation.

An August reading list about online security and 2023 attacks landscape
This is what a record-breaking DDoS attack (exceeding 71 million requests per second) looks like.

1. DDoS attacks & solutions

DDoS threat report for 2023 Q2 (✍️)

DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service) are not new, but they’re still one of the main tools used by attackers. In Q2 2023, Cloudflare witnessed an unprecedented escalation in DDoS attack sophistication, and our report delves into this phenomenon. Pro-Russian hacktivists REvil, Killnet and Anonymous Sudan joined forces to attack Western sites. Mitel vulnerability exploits surged by a whopping 532%, and attacks on crypto rocketed up by 600%. Also, more broadly, attacks exceeding three hours have increased by 103% quarter-over-quarter.

This blog post and the corresponding Cloudflare Radar report shed light on some of these trends. On the other hand, in our Q1 2023 DDoS threat report, a surge in hyper-volumetric attacks that leverage a new generation of botnets that are comprised of Virtual Private Servers (VPS) was observed.

Killnet and AnonymousSudan DDoS attack Australian university websites, and threaten more attacks — here’s what to do about it  (✍️)

In late March 2023, Cloudflare observed HTTP DDoS attacks targeting university websites in Australia. Universities were the first of several groups publicly targeted by the pro-Russian hacker group Killnet and their affiliate AnonymousSudan. This post not only shows a trend with these organized groups targeted attacks but also provides specific recommendations.

In January 2023, something similar was seen with increased cyberattacks to Holocaust educational websites protected by Cloudflare’s Project Galileo.

Uptick in healthcare organizations experiencing targeted DDoS attacks (✍️)

In early February 2023, Cloudflare, as well as other sources, observed an uptick in healthcare organizations targeted by a pro-Russian hacktivist group claiming to be Killnet. There was an increase in the number of these organizations seeking our help to defend against such attacks. Additionally, healthcare organizations that were already protected by Cloudflare experienced mitigated HTTP DDoS attacks.

Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71 million request-per-second DDoS attack (✍️)

Also in early February, Cloudflare detected and mitigated dozens of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks, one of those that became a record-breaking one. The majority of attacks peaked in the ballpark of 50-70 million requests per second (rps) with the largest exceeding 71Mrps. This was the largest reported HTTP DDoS attack on record to date, more than 54% higher than the previous reported record of 46M rps in June 2022.

SLP: a new DDoS amplification vector in the wild (✍️)

This blog post from April 2023 highlights how researchers have published the discovery of a new DDoS reflection/amplification attack vector leveraging the SLP protocol (Service Location Protocol). The prevalence of SLP-based DDoS attacks is also expected to rise, but our automated DDoS protection system keeps Cloudflare customers safe.

Additionally, this year, also in April, a new and improved Network Analytics dashboard was introduced, providing security professionals insights into their DDoS attack and traffic landscape.

2. Application level attacks & WAF

The state of application security in 2023 (✍️)

For the second year in a row we published our Application Security Report. There’s a lot to unpack here, in a year when, according to Netcraft, Cloudflare became the most commonly used web server vendor within the top million sites (it has now a 22% market share). Here are some highlights:

  • 6% of daily HTTP requests (proxied by the Cloudflare network) are mitigated on average. It’s down two percentage points compared to last year.
  • DDoS mitigation accounts for more than 50% of all mitigated traffic, so it’s still the largest contributor to mitigated layer 7 (application layer) HTTP requests.
  • Compared to last year, however, mitigation by the Cloudflare WAF (Web Application Firewall) has grown significantly, and now accounts for nearly 41% of mitigated requests.
  • HTTP Anomaly (examples include malformed method names, null byte characters in headers, etc.) is the most frequent layer 7 attack vectors mitigated by the WAF.
  • 30% of HTTP traffic is automated (bot traffic). 55% of dynamic (non cacheable) traffic is API related. 65% of global API traffic is generated by browsers.
  • 16% of non-verified bot HTTP traffic is mitigated.
  • HTTP Anomaly surpasses SQLi (code injection technique used to attack data-driven applications) as the most common attack vector on API endpoints. Brute force account takeover attacks are increasing. Also, Microsoft Exchange is attacked more than WordPress.

How Cloudflare can help stop malware before it reaches your app (✍️)

In April 2023, we made the job of application security teams easier, by providing a content scanning engine integrated with our Web Application Firewall (WAF), so that malicious files being uploaded by end users, never reach origin servers in the first place. Since September 2022, our Cloudflare WAF became smarter in helping stop attacks before they are known.

Announcing WAF Attack Score Lite and Security Analytics for business customers  (✍️)

In March 2023, we announced that our machine learning empowered WAF and Security analytics view were made available to our Business plan customers, to help detect and stop attacks before they are known. In a nutshell: Early detection + Powerful mitigation = Safer Internet. Or:

early_detection = True
powerful_mitigation = True
safer_internet = early_detection and powerful_mitigation

An August reading list about online security and 2023 attacks landscape

3. Phishing (Area 1 and Zero Trust)

Phishing remains the primary way to breach organizations. According to CISA, 90% of cyber attacks begin with it. The FBI has been publishing Internet Crime Reports, and in the most recent, phishing continues to be ranked #1 in the top five Internet crime types. Reported phishing crimes and victim losses increased by 1038% since 2018, reaching 300,497 incidents in 2022. The FBI also referred to Business Email Compromise as the $43 billion problem facing organizations, with complaints increasing by 127% in 2022, resulting in $3.31 billion in related losses, compared to 2021.

In 2022, Cloudflare Area 1 kept 2.3 billion unwanted messages out of customer inboxes. This year, that number will be easily surpassed.

Introducing Cloudflare's 2023 phishing threats report (✍️)

In August 2023, Cloudflare published its first phishing threats report — fully available here. The report explores key phishing trends and related recommendations, based on email security data from May 2022 to May 2023.

Some takeaways include how attackers using deceptive links was the #1 phishing tactic — and how they are evolving how they get you to click and when they weaponize the link. Also, identity deception takes multiple forms (including business email compromise (BEC) and brand impersonation), and can easily bypass email authentication standards.

Cloudflare Area 1 earns SOC 2 report (✍️)

More than one year ago, Cloudflare acquired Area 1 Security, and with that we added to our Cloudflare Zero Trust platform an essential cloud-native email security service that identifies and blocks attacks before they hit user inboxes. This year, we’ve obtained one of the best ways to provide customers assurance that the sensitive information they send to us can be kept safe: a SOC 2 Type II report.

Back in January, during our CIO Week, Email Link Isolation was made generally available to all our customers. What is it? A safety net for the suspicious links that end up in inboxes and that users may click — anyone can click on the wrong link by mistake. This added protection turns Cloudflare Area 1 into the most comprehensive email security solution when it comes to protecting against malware, phishing attacks, etc. Also, in true Cloudflare fashion, it’s a one-click deployment.

Additionally, from the same week, Cloudflare combined capabilities from Area 1 Email Security and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to provide complete data protection for corporate email, and also partnered with KnowBe4 to equip organizations with real-time security coaching to avoid phishing attacks.

How to stay safe from phishing (✍️)

Phishing attacks come in all sorts of ways to fool people. This high level “phish” guide, goes over the different types — while email is definitely the most common, there are others —, and provides some tips to help you catch these scams before you fall for them.

Top 50 most impersonated brands in phishing attacks and new tools you can use to protect your employees from them (✍️)

Here we go over arguably one of the hardest challenges any security team is constantly facing, detecting, blocking, and mitigating the risks of phishing attacks. During our Security Week in March, a Top 50 list of the most impersonated brands in phishing attacks was presented (spoiler alert: AT&T Inc., PayPal, and Microsoft are on the podium).

Additionally, it was also announced the expansion of the phishing protections available to Cloudflare One customers by automatically identifying — and blocking — so-called “confusable” domains. What is Cloudflare One? It’s our suite of products that provides a customizable, and integrated with what a company already uses, Zero Trust network-as-a-service platform. It’s built for that already mentioned ease of mind and fearless online use. Cloudflare One, along with the use of physical security keys, was what thwarted the sophisticated “Oktapus” phishing attack targeting Cloudflare employees last summer.

On the Zero Trust front, you can also find our recent PDF guide titled “Cloudflare Zero Trust: A roadmap for highrisk organizations”.

An August reading list about online security and 2023 attacks landscape

4. AI/Malware/Ransomware & other risks

We have shown in previous years the role of our Cloudflare Security Center to investigate threats, and the relevance of different types of risks, such as these two 2022 and 2021 examples: “Anatomy of a Targeted Ransomware Attack” and “Ransom DDoS attacks target a Fortune Global 500 company”. However, there are new risks in the 2023 horizon.

How to secure Generative AI applications (✍️)

Groundbreaking technology brings groundbreaking challenges. Cloudflare has experience protecting some of the largest AI applications in the world, and in this blog post there are some tips and best practices for securing generative AI applications. Success in consumer-facing applications inherently expose the underlying AI systems to millions of users, vastly increasing the potential attack surface.

Using the power of Cloudflare’s global network to detect malicious domains using machine learning  (✍️)

Taking into account the objective of preventing threats before they create havoc, here we go over that Cloudflare recently developed proprietary models leveraging machine learning and other advanced analytical techniques. These are able to detect security threats that take advantage of the domain name system (DNS), known as the phonebook of the Internet.

How sophisticated scammers and phishers are preying on customers of Silicon Valley Bank (✍️)

In order to breach trust and trick unsuspecting victims, threat actors overwhelmingly use topical events as lures. The news about what happened at Silicon Valley Bank earlier this year was one of the latest events to watch out for and stay vigilant against opportunistic phishing campaigns using SVB as the lure. At that time, Cloudforce One (Cloudflare’s threat operations and research team) significantly increased our brand monitoring focused on SVB’s digital presence.

How Cloudflare can help stop malware before it reaches your app (✍️)

In April 2023, Cloudflare launched a tool to make the job of application security teams easier, by providing a content scanning engine integrated with our Web Application Firewall (WAF), so that malicious files being uploaded by end users, never reach origin servers in the first place.

Analyze any URL safely using the Cloudflare Radar URL Scanner  (✍️)

Cloudflare Radar is our free platform for Internet insights. In March, our URL Scanner was launched, allowing anyone to analyze a URL safely. The report that it creates contains a myriad of technical details, including a phishing scan. Many users have been using it for security reasons, but others are just exploring what’s under-the-hood look at any webpage.

Unmasking the top exploited vulnerabilities of 2022 (✍️)

Last, but not least, already from August 2023, this blog post focuses on the most commonly exploited vulnerabilities, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Given Cloudflare’s role as a reverse proxy to a large portion of the Internet, we delve into how the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) mentioned by CISA are being exploited on the Internet, and a bit of what has been learned.

If you want to learn about making a website more secure (and faster) while loading third-party tools like Google Analytics 4, Facebook CAPI, TikTok, and others, you can get to know our Cloudflare Zaraz solution. It reached general availability in July 2023.

Wrap up

“The Internet was not built for what it has become”.

This is how one of Cloudflare’s S-1 document sections begins. It is also commonly referenced in our blog to show how this remarkable experiment, the network of networks, wasn’t designed for the role it now plays in our daily lives and work. Security, performance and privacy are crucial in a time when anyone can be the target of an attack, threat, or vulnerability. While AI can aid in mitigating attacks, it also adds complexity to attackers' tactics.

With that in mind, as we've highlighted in this 2023 reading list suggestions/online attacks guide, prioritizing the prevention of detrimental attack outcomes remains the optimal strategy. Hopefully, it will make some of the attacks on your company go unnoticed or be consequences-free, or even transform them into interesting stories to share when you access your security dashboard.

If you're interested in exploring specific examples, you can delve into case studies within our hub, where you’ll find security related stories from different institutions. From a technology company like Sage, to the State of Arizona, or the Republic of Estonia Information Security Authority, and even Cybernews, a cybersecurity news media outlet.

And because the future of a private and secure Internet is also in our minds, it's worth mentioning that in March 2022, Cloudflare enabled post-quantum cryptography support for all our customers. The topic of post-quantum cryptography, designed to be secure against the threat of quantum computers, is quite interesting and worth some delving into, but even without knowing what it is, it’s good to know that protection is already here.

If you want to try some security features mentioned, the Cloudflare Security Center is a good place to start (free plans included). The same applies to our Zero Trust ecosystem (or Cloudflare One as our SASE, Secure Access Service Edge) that is available as self-serve, and also includes a free plan. This vendor-agnostic roadmap shows the general advantages of the Zero Trust architecture, and as we’ve seen, there’s also one focused on high risk organizations.

Be cautious. Be prepared. Be safe.

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original http://blog.cloudflare.com/how-the-coronation-of-king-charles-iii-affected-internet-traffic/

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

When major events in a country happen Internet traffic patterns are often impacted, depending on the type of event. But what about the coronation of a king or queen? There’s no similar precedent, with a worldwide impact, in the Internet age, except maybe the coronation of the king of Thailand, in 2019. The last time it happened in the United Kingdom was 70 years ago (June 2, 1953), with Queen Elizabeth II; it was the first British coronation to be fully televised. Neither the Internet nor ARPANET were around at the time.

Imagine a grand royal event (if you saw the broadcast or the news, there’s no need), filled with pomp and pageantry, that's so captivating it impacts Internet traffic. That's what happened during the coronation of Charles III and Camilla, the newly crowned king and queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms. As the coronation ceremony unfolded, on Saturday morning, May 6, 2023, there were clear spikes and dips in traffic, each coinciding with key moments of the ceremony.

Then came Sunday, and with it, the Coronation Big Lunch event. As the nation sat down to enjoy a communal meal throughout the country, Internet traffic took a significant nosedive, dropping by as much as 18%. The Sunday trends didn't stop there. As night fell and Prince William took to the stage to deliver a speech during the Coronation Concert, there was a clear drop in Internet traffic. Monday, May 8, was a bank holiday in the UK in honor of the coronation, and after a weekend of outdoor coronation events, Internet traffic was buzzing, noticeably higher than usual.

In the past, we’ve seen Internet traffic drop when a national televised event is happening — last year, we saw it, including in the UK, during the Eurovision, although traffic does increase when results are in. Different types of events and broadcasts yield different Internet patterns.

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

Coronation day: a rollercoaster of Internet traffic

Let's take a closer look at coronation day, May 6, 2023, when Internet traffic in the UK had its own peaks and valleys. There were moments when the digital realm seemed to hold its breath, with traffic dipping to its lowest points. The arrival of the royals and their guests marked one such moment. As the anticipation built and all eyes turned to the grand entrances, Internet traffic dipped to a notable 7% lower than the previous week.

Here's a play-by-play of the day's traffic trends, compared to the previous week. We’re using a 15-minute granularity, and aligning with key events as reported live by the BBC:

Traffic decreases (Saturday, May 6, 2023)

Rank by drop (compared with previous week) Coronation events (from the BBC)
#1 — 10:45-11:00 local time (-7% in traffic) When the royals and guests were arriving at Westminster Abbey. The King and Queen arrived at 11:00.
#2 — 12:00 (-2%) When King Charles III (12:02) was crowned.
#3 — 13:00 (-3%) When King Charles and Queen Camilla left Westminster Abbey. The Coronation Procession started.

On Saturday, May 6, 2023, a downward trend in traffic began after 06:15, with traffic 5% lower than the previous week. This trend shifted to a traffic increase after 11:15 (+6%), coinciding with the ongoing ceremony. The exceptions were the previously mentioned traffic dips. The following table illustrates clear traffic spikes after significant moments, some of which are represented in the previous table. Here's a list of periods with higher growth:

Traffic increases (Saturday, May 6, 2023)

Rank by increase (compared with previous week) Coronation events (from the BBC)
#1 — 14:45 local time (+14% in traffic) This happened after the military flypast (14:35), when the royals were on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.
#2 — 12:30 (+13.7%) After King Charles III was crowned at 12:02 (at which time traffic dropped 2%) and after Queen Camilla (12:16) was crowned, when a choir was singing Agnus Dei (12:30).
#3 — 15:30-16:15 (+13%) During the highlights of the event and reactions from royal fans.
#4 — 14:00 (+13%). When the UK’s national anthem was played in the gardens of Buckingham Palace.
#5 — 11:30 (+11%). Just after the coronation oath and during the choir’s singing.

As guests and royals arrived and during moments like the king's crowning, Internet traffic noticeably dropped. However, during parts of the ceremony such as the choir singing, Internet traffic seemed to increase. That was also clear after the military flypast, over the Buckingham Palace balcony.

The following chart illustrates UK Internet traffic during the weekend, with the purple dotted line representing the previous weekend.

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

On a daily basis, daily traffic was 4% higher on Saturday, May 6, compared to the previous Saturday.

The Big Lunch and Prince William’s speech

Another trend from the coronation weekend relates to the events that took place on Sunday, May 7. Internet trends here align with what we observed almost a year ago during Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee. Sunday was a day of celebration with both the Coronation Big Lunch (where neighbors and communities were invited to share food and fun together across the country) and the Coronation Concert taking place.

Next, we present the percentages of increase/decrease in requests during this past weekend, compared with the previous week (a slightly different perspective from the previous chart):

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

On Sunday, May 7, it's clear that UK traffic was lower than usual right after 07:00 local time (-2% in traffic), but it dropped the most after 12:00 (-5%), compared to the previous week. The moment with the biggest drop in traffic, compared to the previous week, was between 14:15 and 15:30, when traffic was around 18% lower. That was still Big Lunch time, given that it’s a multiple hour event full of “food and fun” — there were more than 65,000 Coronation Big Lunch events around the UK. During last year's Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee, traffic dropped as much as 25% on Sunday, June 5, 2022, at 15:00.

At night, the Coronation Concert took center stage, broadcast live from Windsor Castle on the BBC after 20:00. The lineup included musical guests such as Take That, Lionel Richie, Katy Perry, and Andrea Bocelli. However, the star of the event, at least in terms of when Internet traffic was at its lowest that evening, was William, Prince of Wales. Cloudflare observed another significant drop in traffic, compared to the previous week, around 21:15-21:30, when traffic was 7% lower than the previous week. At that time, Lionel Richie had just performed, and Prince William was on stage for a special address to the king.

In terms of daily traffic, if on Coronation Saturday we saw an increase (4%), on Coronation Sunday there was a 6% drop compared to the previous week. On Monday, the coronation bank holiday, there weren't any major coronation events, and traffic was 4% higher than the previous week (May 1, also a bank holiday in the UK).

Coronation, a mobile devices day

Zooming in on the distribution of traffic from mobile devices, we find that Saturday, May 6, stands out in 2023. On this day, mobile traffic accounted for 61% of total traffic, a figure only matched by April 15 and January 1, 2023. Similarly, Sunday, May 7, was one of the Sundays with the highest percentage of mobile traffic, at 60%. This percentage was only surpassed by Easter Sunday, April 9 (60.4%), and, unsurprisingly, January 1, 2023 (61%).

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

Wales sees the largest Sunday drop in Internet traffic

Which UK countries were more impacted? Looking at both coronation weekend days, we saw a similar pattern (growth in traffic at around the time of the coronation ceremony on Saturday, and decrease on Sunday) in all of them. Looking at the Sunday drop, England had as much as 16% in traffic at 15:30; Scotland had as much as a 17% drop at around 13:30; Wales had as much as a 19% drop at around 15:00; and Northern Ireland had as much as an 18% drop in traffic, compared to the previous week, at the same time. Wales had the biggest drop.

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

From Canada to Australia

Last year, in early June, we observed the impact of Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee on the Internet in the UK. This event, which celebrated the first British monarch to reach a 70th anniversary on the throne, caused a significant drop in traffic, as much as 25% (on Sunday, June 5, 2022). This trend was also noticeable in other Commonwealth countries.

Several Commonwealth countries also held notable events to celebrate both the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and the recent coronation. In Canada, events and activities related to the coronation mirrored those for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Whether related or not, we observed on Saturday, May 6, as much as an ~8% drop in Internet traffic compared to the previous week, between 09:30 and 16:30 Toronto time. On Sunday, the drop was even larger, with about 10% less traffic between 10:30 and 12:00.

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

In Australia, the difference in traffic wasn't as pronounced as in Canada. However, traffic was 7% lower than the previous week at 20:00 Sydney time (10:00 UTC), when the coronation ceremony began on May 6. This was the only period over the past weekend when traffic was lower than the previous one.

And what about the impact on DNS traffic to our 1.1.1.1 resolver from UK users? Social media apps certainly felt the ripple. Domains linked to social media platforms, which typically surge in popularity during major events, such as Twitter, experienced a notable uptick. We saw a 33% increase in DNS traffic in those around 14:00 local time on Saturday, May 6, compared to the previous week. By 18:00 on May 7, traffic had soared to 64% higher, and it remained elevated during the Coronation Concert: at 22:00, it was 36% higher.

Meanwhile, video-centric social media platforms, like TikTok, hit their peak at around 20:00 on May 7, when the Coronation Concert was starting, with a whopping 57% surge in DNS traffic.

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

During the coronation weekend, the peak period for DNS traffic to domains related to the royal family fell between 11:00 and 12:00 local time. In this hour, traffic was an impressive forty times higher than the same time the previous weekend (that growth is higher, more than 40x, when using a May 2022 baseline, as is seen in the next chart).

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

If we broaden our view to the past 12 months, we see that the domains associated with the royal family hit their highest point on the day Queen Elizabeth II passed away, September 8. Around 18:00 local time, DNS traffic was 12x higher than the previous week. This was followed by the day of Her Majesty's funeral, September 19, when around 11:00, DNS traffic was 6x higher than usual.

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

A similar impact was seen, related to the Queen's death, on British news organizations, in the past 12 months. September 8, around 18:00, was the peak of the whole year in terms of DNS traffic to news organizations, according to our data. At that time, DNS traffic was 263% higher than at the same time in the previous week. During the September 19 funeral, at 11:00, DNS traffic was 24% higher than before.

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

During the recent coronation weekend, DNS traffic to UK news organizations on Saturday, May 6, was higher than usual during the morning by as much as 47%, at 11:00, and continued higher than before mostly during that day.

September 8, 2022: The end of a 70-year reign

We already mentioned domain trends related to when Queen Elizabeth II passed away on September 8, 2022. But what about the impact on Internet traffic? We saw a 7% decrease in Internet traffic in the UK on that day at around 18:30 local time compared to the previous week, coinciding with the announcement of her death.

The following weekend, on Saturday, September 10, 2022, traffic was as much as 17% lower at 15:00. This was the day Charles was proclaimed the new king and people flocked to the royal palaces to pay their respects — Prince William and Kate, and Prince Harry and Meghan, paused outside Windsor Castle to read messages left by mourners.

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

Internet traffic dropped even further compared to the previous week during Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral: on September 19, 2022, traffic was 27% lower at 10:45. According to Wikipedia, this was when the Queen's coffin was transported from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey on the State Gun Carriage of the Royal Navy.

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

Old traditions in a recent medium

In this blog post, we've seen how a very old tradition, like the British coronation, can impact a very recent innovation, the Internet. Almost 70 years ago, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation was the first ever to be televised, at a time when television in the UK was less than 20 years old. The event, which took place at Westminster Abbey in London (the site of coronations since 1066), was watched by 27 million people in the UK alone and millions more around the world.

This time around, King Charles III's coronation could be viewed through that now old medium called television, or online, via streaming services. The Internet is much younger than Britain’s former monarch's reign or even Sir Tim Berners-Lee (born in 1955), and it was only 30 years ago that the World Wide Web protocol and code were made available royalty-free, enabling the web's widespread use.

Streaming media events online, on the other hand, at least on a large scale, are a more recent development — YouTube was launched in 2005. Looking at video platforms trends in the UK, we could see how DNS traffic was 13% higher at around 12:00, during the coronation ceremony, on May 6 — it was broadcast on YouTube.

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

British broadcasters, such as the BBC, also included a streaming version of the event. There, the increase in DNS traffic was even higher. Between 11:00 and 12:00, on May 6, DNS traffic was 197% higher than in the previous week.

How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic

The difference in DNS traffic to UK's streaming services was even more pronounced when Queen Elizabeth II passed away on September 8, with a 470% increase in DNS traffic around 18:00 compared to the previous week. During the Queen's funeral on September 19, DNS traffic was 150% higher around 11:00 compared to the previous week.

You can check Internet trends related to events such as Easter, Ramadan, an ongoing civil war or a relevant UK outage here in our blog. You can also monitor changes in Internet patterns as they occur on Cloudflare Radar or using the Radar API. On social media, we’re at @CloudflareRadar on Twitter or cloudflare.social/@radar on Mastodon.

Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original http://blog.cloudflare.com/sudan-armed-conflict-impact-on-the-internet-since-april-15-2023/

Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns

Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns

On Saturday, April 15, 2023, an armed conflict between rival factions of the military government of Sudan began. Cloudflare observed a disruption in Internet traffic on that Saturday, starting at 08:00 UTC, which deepened on Sunday. Since then, the conflict has continued, and different ISPs have been affected, in some cases with a 90% drop in traffic. On May 2, Internet traffic is still ~30% lower than pre-conflict levels. This blog post will show what we’ve been seeing in terms of Internet disruption there.

On the day that clashes broke out, our data shows that traffic in the country dropped as much as 60% on Saturday, after 08:00 UTC, with a partial recovery on Sunday around 14:00, but it has consistently been lower than before. Although we saw outages and disruptions on major local Internet providers, the general drop in traffic could also be related to different human usage patterns because of the conflict, with people trying to leave the country. In Ukraine, we saw a clear drop in traffic, not always related to ISP outages, after the war started, when people were leaving the country.

Here’s the hourly perspective of Sudan’s Internet traffic over the past weeks as seen on Cloudflare Radar, with the orange shading highlighting the disruption since April 15.

Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns

The next chart of daily traffic in Sudan (that is dominated by mobile device traffic — more on that below) clearly shows a daily drop in traffic after April 15. On that Saturday, traffic was 27% lower than on the previous Saturday, and it was a 43% decrease on Sunday, April 16, compared to the previous week.

Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns

Frequent outages on different ISPs

On April 23 and 24, there was a more significant outage affecting multiple ISPs (and their ASNs or autonomous systems) that brought Internet traffic in the country, as the previous chart clearly shows, even lower. There was no official reason given for those major disruptions that had a nationwide impact. That said, the disruptions were also felt in neighbor country Chad in several ISPs, given that Sudan’s Sudatel (AS15706) seems to be an upstream provider.

Cloudflare saw a 74% decrease in traffic on Sunday, April 23, compared to Sunday, April 9, before the conflict, and a 70% drop on Monday, April 24, compared with Monday, April 10. In some ISPs, the impact was bigger.

In the news, ISP MTN (AS36972) reportedly blocked Internet services on April 16, and, according to Reuters, was told by the authorities to restore it a few hours after. We saw a clear outage in that ASN, an almost 90% drop in traffic compared with previous weeks for about 10 hours, after 00:00 UTC on April 16, and it mostly recovered after 10:00 UTC.

Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns

The most impacted ISPs were Sudatel (AS15706), Zain (AS36998), and Canar (AS33788) with almost complete outages. Canar was the outage that lasted the longest, with 83 hours, from April 21 to 25. Next, it was the main ISP in the country, Sudatel, with 40 hours of almost complete Internet blackout, followed by Zain, with 10 hours on April 24.

The return of traffic coincided with the time a nationwide ceasefire of 72 hours was agreed upon on April 24.

BGP or Border Gateway Protocol is a mechanism to exchange routing information between networks on the Internet, and a crucial part that enables the existence of the network of networks (the Internet). BGP announcements or updates can signal disruption in connectivity or outages, as we saw in Canada in 2022 with Rogers ISP or in the UK in 2023 with Virgin Media, for example. In this case, highlighted in the next chart, BGP updates biggest spikes from Sudatel (AS15706) are consistent with both the start of the outage, and the return to traffic.

Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns

Mobile device traffic percentage grew after April 15

Sudan is typically one of the countries with the highest percentage of mobile device traffic in the world. We’ve written about this in the past (see the 2021 mobile device traffic blog post), and at the time the average was 83%. Observing data from the past week, as seen on our Cloudflare Radar traffic worldwide page, Sudan leads our ranking with 88% of traffic coming from mobile devices.

Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns

Looking at the past few weeks, we can see mobile device traffic growing as a percentage of all Internet traffic in Sudan. The April 3 week showed a lower percentage than it is now, with 77% (23% was desktop traffic percentage). In the April 10 week, which includes April 15 and 16, mobile device traffic rose to 80%. In the week of April 17, it was 85%, and the week of April 24, it’s 88%.

Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns

How is Internet traffic holding up more recently in Sudan? Looking at a week-over-week hourly comparison, traffic last Friday was still around 55% lower than before April 15, and on May 2, traffic is still around 30% lower than pre-conflict levels (April 11).

Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns

In the previous chart, there’s a regular drop in traffic observed at around 16:00 UTC, ~18:00 local time. It’s more evident before April 15, but it generally continues after that. That drop in traffic is consistent with Ramadan trends we discussed recently in a blog post. It is related to the Iftar, the first meal after sunset that breaks the fast and often serves as a family or community event — sunset in Khartoum, Sudan, is at 18:07.

As of this Tuesday, Internet traffic data (from a linear perspective) shows that traffic continues to be much lower than before, and this morning at 08:00 UTC it is ~30% lower than it was three weeks ago (pre-conflict), at the same time, showing some recovery in the past couple of days.

Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns

According to the BBC, reporting from Sudan, the Internet continues to be impacted, an observation that is consistent with our data.

Looking more closely at Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, where most people live and the conflict began, traffic was impacted after April 15 (the blue line in the next chart). On April 27, Internet traffic was around 76% lower than it was on the same pre-conflict weekday (April 13). The next chart also shows the typical drop around 18:00, for Ramadan’s Iftar, the first meal after sunset.

Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns

Looking at DNS queries (from Cloudflare’s resolver) to websites or domains in Sudan, we saw a clear shift from the use of WhatsApp-related domains for messaging to Signal ones after April 15 — the drop in DNS traffic to WhatsApp was similar to the increase in DNS traffic to Signal domains.

Social media platforms such as LinkedIn, but also TikTok or YouTube, had a clear decrease since April 15. On the other hand, Facebook and Twitter saw an increase, especially on April 15 and 16, with some disruptions (possibly related to Internet access), but with bigger spikes than before, usually at night, since then. Here’s the aggregated view to social media platforms:

Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns

Conclusion: ongoing impact

The conflict in Sudan continues, and so does its Internet traffic impact. We will continue to monitor the Internet situation on Cloudflare Radar, where you can check Sudan’s country page and the Outage Center.

On social media, we’re at @CloudflareRadar on Twitter or cloudflare.social/@radar on Mastodon.

How to stay safe from phishing

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/stay-safe-phishing-attacks/

How to stay safe from phishing

How to stay safe from phishing

As you wake up in the morning feeling sleepy and preoccupied, you receive an urgent email from a seemingly familiar source, and without much thought, you click on a link that you shouldn’t have. Sometimes it’s that simple, and this more than 30-year-old phishing method means chaos breaks loose – whether it’s your personal bank account or social media, where an attacker also begins to trick your family and friends; or at your company, with what could mean systems and data being compromised, services being disrupted, and all other subsequent consequences. Following up on our “Top 50 Most Impersonated Brands in phishing attacks” post, here are some tips to catch these scams before you fall for them.

We’re all human, and responding to or interacting with a malicious email remains the primary way to breach organizations. According to CISA, 90% of cyber attacks begin with a phishing email, and losses from a similar type of phishing attack, known as business email compromise (BEC), are a $43 billion problem facing organizations. One thing is for sure, phishing attacks are getting more sophisticated every day thanks to emerging tools like AI chatbots and the expanded usage of various communication apps (Teams, Google Chat, Slack, LinkedIn, etc.).

What is phishing? Where it starts (the hacker’s foot in the door)

Seems simple, but it is always good to remind everyone in simple terms. Email phishing is a deceptive technique where the attacker uses various types of bait, such as a convincing email or link, to trick victims into providing sensitive information or downloading malware. If the bait works — the attacker only needs it to work once — and the victim clicks on that link, the attacker now has a foot in the door to carry out further attacks with potentially devastating consequences. Anyone can be fooled by a general “phish” — but these attacks can also be focused on a single target, with specific information about the victim, called spear phishing.

Recent examples of phishing include Reddit as a target, Twilio, and also Cloudflare in a similar attack around the same time — we explain here “The mechanics of a sophisticated phishing scam and how we stopped it” thanks to our own use of Cloudflare One products. In some cases, a home computer of an employee as a target can be the door opening for hackers in what is a few weeks later a major breach.

Some alerts to bear in mind include the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), that phishing attacks are targeting individuals and organizations in a range of sectors. The White House National Cybersecurity Strategy (Cloudflare is ready for that) also highlights those risks. Germany, Japan or Australia are working on a similar approach.

Without further ado, here are some tips to protect yourself from phishing attacks.

Tips for Staying Safe Online: How to Avoid Being Reeled in By Phishing Scams

  • Don’t click strategy. If you get an email from your bank or government agencies like the IRS, instead of clicking on a link in the email, go directly to the website itself.
  • Look out for misspellings or strange characters in the sender’s email address. Phishing attempts often rely on look-alike domains or ‘from’ emails to encourage clicks. Common tactics are extra or switched letters (microsogft[.]com), omissions (microsft[.]com) or characters that look alike (the letter o and 0, or micr0soft[.]com).

Here’s a classic brand impersonation phish, using Chase as the trusted lure:

How to stay safe from phishing
The link in the text body appears to be a Chase domain, but when clicked, it actually opens a SendGrid URL (a known email delivery platform). It then redirects the user to a phishing site impersonating Chase.
  • Think before clicking links to “unlock account” or “update payment details.” Technology services were one of the top industries to be used in phishing campaigns, due to the personal information that can be found in our email, online storage, and social media accounts. Hover over a link and confirm it’s a URL you’re familiar with before clicking.
  • Be wary of financial-related messages. Financial institutions are the most likely industry to be phished, so pause and assess any messages asking to accept or make a payment.
  • Look out for messages that create a sense of urgency. Emails or text messages that warn of a final chance to pick up a package, or last chance to confirm an account, are likely fake. The rise in online shopping during the pandemic has made retail and logistics/shipping companies a hot target for these types of phishing attempts.

    Both financial and package delivery scams typically use the SMS phishing attack, or smishing, and are related to the attacker’s use of SMS messages to lure the victims. Cloudflare was the target of this type of phishing a few months ago (it was stopped). Next, we show you an example of a text message from that thwarted attack:

How to stay safe from phishing
  • If things sound too good to be true, they probably are. Beware of “limited time offers” for free gifts, exclusive services, or great deals on trips to Hawaii or the Maldives. Phishing emails target our senses of satisfaction, pleasure, and excitement to compel us to make split second decisions without thinking things through. These types of tactics are lures for a user to click on a link or provide sensitive information. Pause, even if it’s for a few seconds, and quickly look up the offer online to see if others have received similar offers.
  • Very important message from a very important… Phishing emails sometimes mimic high-ranking individuals, urging urgent action such as money transfers or credential sharing. Scrutinize emails with such requests, and verify their authenticity. Contact your manager if the sender is a CEO. For unfamiliar politicians, assess the request’s feasibility before responding.
  • The message body is full of errors (but beware of AI tools). Poor grammar, spelling, and sentence structure may indicate that an email is not from a reputable source. That said, recent AI text tools have made it easier for hackers or bad actors to create convincing and error-free copies.
  • Romance scam emails. These are emails where scammers adopt a fake online identity to gain a victim’s affection and trust. They may also send an email that appears to have been sent in error, prompting the recipient to respond and initiating a conversation with the fraudster. This tactic is used to lure victims.
  • Use a password manager. Password managers will verify if the domain name matches what you expect, and will warn you if you try to fill in your password on the wrong domain name.

If you want to apply even greater scrutiny to a potential phishing email, you can check out our learning center to understand what happens when an email does not pass standard authentication methods like SPF, DKIM, or DMARC.

A few more Cloudflare related trends, besides the Top 50 Most Impersonated Brands, comes from Cloudflare Area 1. In 2022, our services focused on email protection identified and kept 2.3 billion unwanted messages out of customer inboxes. On average, we blocked 6.3 million messages per day. That’s almost 44,000 every 10 minutes, which is the time it takes to read a blog post like this one.

Typically, the type of email threats most used (looking at our Area 1 January 2023 data) are: identity deception, malicious links, brand impersonation, malicious attachments, scam, extortion, account compromise. And there’s also voice phishing.

Voice phishing, also known as vishing, is another common threat and is related to the practice of tricking people into sharing sensitive information through telephone calls. Victims are led to believe they are talking to a trusted entity, such as the tax authority, their employer, or an airline they use. Here, you can learn more about protecting yourself or your company from voice phishing.

Another type of attack is the watering hole attack, where hackers identify websites frequented by users within a targeted organization and then compromise those websites to distribute malware. Those are often times associated with supply chain exploitation.

Next, we show a phishing email example that was received from a real vendor that got an email account hacked in what is called vendor invoice fraud:

How to stay safe from phishing

Last but not least in our list of examples, there’s also Calendar phishing, where a fraudster could potentially use a cloud email account to inject fake invites into target employee calendars. Those are detected and avoided with products in our Cloudflare Zero Trust product.

As we wrote recently for CIO Week, there’s also a possible safety net, even if the best trained user mistakes a good link from a bad link. Leveraging the Cloudflare Browser Isolation service, Email Link Isolation turns Cloudflare’s cloud email security into the most comprehensive solution when it comes to protecting against phishing attacks that go beyond just email. It rewrites and isolates links that could be exploited, keeps users vigilant by alerting them of the uncertainty around the website they’re about to visit, and protects against malware and vulnerabilities. Also, in true Cloudflare fashion, it’s a one-click deployment. Check the related blog post to learn more.

That said, not all malicious links come from emails. If you’re concerned about malicious links that may come through Instant Messaging or other communication tools (Slack, iMessage, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc), Zero Trust and Remote Browser Isolation are an effective way to go.

Conclusion: better safe than sorry

As we saw, email is one of the most ubiquitous and also most exploited tools that businesses use every single day. Baiting users into clicking malicious links within an email has been a particularly long-standing tactic for the vast majority of bad actors, from the most sophisticated criminal organizations to the least experienced attackers. So, remember, when online:

Be cautious. Be prepared. Be safe.

If you want to learn more about email security, you can visit our Learning Center or reach out for a complimentary phishing risk assessment for your organization.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/one-year-of-war-in-ukraine/

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

The Internet has become a significant factor in geopolitical conflicts, such as the ongoing war in Ukraine. Tomorrow marks one year since the Russian invasion of that country. This post reports on Internet insights and discusses how Ukraine’s Internet remained resilient in spite of dozens of disruptions in three different stages of the conflict.

Key takeaways:

  • Internet traffic shifts in Ukraine are clearly visible from east to west as Ukrainians fled the war, with country-wide traffic dropping as much as 33% after February 24, 2022.
  • Air strikes on energy infrastructure starting in October led to widespread Internet disruptions that continue in 2023.
  • Application-layer cyber attacks in Ukraine rose 1,300% in early March 2022 compared to pre-war levels.
  • Government administration, financial services, and the media saw the most attacks targeting Ukraine.
  • Traffic from a number of networks in Kherson was re-routed through Russia between June and October, subjecting traffic to Russia’s restrictions and limitations, including content filtering. Even after traffic ceased to reroute through Russia, those Ukrainian networks saw major outages through at least the end of the year, while two networks remain offline.
  • Through efforts on the ground to repair damaged fiber optics and restore electrical power, Ukraine’s networks have remained resilient from both an infrastructure and routing perspective. This is partly due to Ukraine’s widespread connectivity to networks outside the country and large number of IXPs.
  • Starlink traffic in Ukraine grew over 500% between mid-March and mid-May, and continued to grow from mid-May through mid-November, increasing nearly 300% over that six-month period. For the full period from mid-March (two weeks after it was made available) to mid-December, it was over a 1,600% increase, dropping a bit after that.

Internet changes and disruptions

An Internet shock after February 24, 2022

In Ukraine, human Internet traffic dropped as much as 33% in the weeks following February 24. The following chart shows Cloudflare’s perspective on daily traffic (by number of requests).

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

Internet traffic levels recovered over the next few months, including strong growth seen in September and October, when many Ukrainian refugees returned to the country. That said, there were also country-wide outages, mostly after October, that are discussed below.

14% of total traffic from Ukraine (including traffic from Crimea and other occupied regions) was mitigated as potential attacks, while 10% of total traffic to Ukraine was mitigated as potential attacks in the last 12 months.

Before February 24, 2022, typical weekday Internet traffic in Ukraine initially peaked after lunch, around 15:00 local time, dropped between 17:00 and 18:00 (consistent with people leaving work), and reached the biggest peak of the day at around 21:00 (possibly after dinner for mobile and streaming use).

After the invasion started, we observed less variation during the day in a clear change in the usual pattern given the reported disruption and “exodus” from the country​. During the first few days after the invasion began, peak traffic occurred around 19:00, at a time when nights for many in cities such as Kyiv were spent in improvised underground bunkers. By late March, the 21:00 peak had returned, but the early evening drop in traffic did not return until May.

When looking at Ukraine Internet requests by type of traffic in the chart below (from February 10, 2022, through February 2023), we observe that while traffic from both mobile and desktop devices dropped after the invasion, request volume from mobile devices has remained higher over the past year. Pre-war, mobile devices accounted for around 53% of traffic, and grew to around 60% during the first weeks of the invasion. By late April, it had returned to typical pre-war levels, falling back to around 54% of traffic. There’s also a noticeable December drop/outage that we’ll go over below.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

Millions moving from east to west in Ukraine

The invasion brought attacks and failing infrastructure across a number of cities, but the target in the early days wasn’t the country’s energy infrastructure, as it was in October 2022. In the first weeks of the war, Internet traffic changes were largely driven by people evacuating conflict zones with their families. Over eight million Ukrainians left the country in the first three months, and many more relocated internally to safer cities, although many returned during the summer of 2022. The Internet played a critical role during this refugee crisis, supporting communications and access to real-time information that could save lives, as well as apps providing services, among others.

There was also an increase in traffic in the western part of Ukraine, in areas such as Lviv (further away from the conflict areas), and a decrease in the east, in areas like Kharkiv, where the Russian military was arriving and attacks were a constant threat. The figure below provides a view of how Internet traffic across Ukraine changed in the week after the war began (a darker pink means a drop in traffic — as much as 60% — while a darker green indicates an increase in Internet traffic — as much as 50%).

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience
Source: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/dsUSJ/2/

The biggest drops in Internet traffic observed in Ukraine in the first days of the war were in Kharkiv Oblast in the east, and Chernihiv in the north, both with a 60% decrease, followed by Kyiv Oblast, with traffic 40% lower on March 2, 2022, as compared with February 23.

In western Ukraine, traffic surged. The regions with the highest observed traffic growth included Rivne (50%), Volyn (30%), Lviv (28%), Chernivtsi (25%), and Zakarpattia (15%).

At the city level, analysis of Internet traffic in Ukraine gives us some insight into usage of the Internet and availability of Internet access in those first weeks, with noticeable outages in places where direct conflict was going on or that was already occupied by Russian soldiers.

North of Kyiv, the city of Chernihiv had a significant drop in traffic the first week of the war and residual traffic by mid-March, with traffic picking up only after the Russians retreated in early April.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

In the capital city of Kyiv, there is a clear disruption in Internet traffic right after the war started, possibly caused by people leaving, attacks and use of underground shelters.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

Near Kyiv, we observed a clear outage in early March in Bucha. After April 1, when the Russians withdrew, Internet traffic started to come back a few weeks later.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

In Irpin, just outside Kyiv, close to the Hostomel airport and Bucha, a similar outage pattern to Bucha was observed. Traffic only began to come back more clearly in late May.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

In the east, in the city of Kharkiv, traffic dropped 50% on March 3, with a similar scenario seen not far away in Sumy. The disruption was related to people leaving and also by power outages affecting some networks.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

Other cities in the south of Ukraine, like Berdyansk, had outages. This graph shows Enerhodar, the small city where Europe’s largest nuclear plant, Zaporizhzhya NPP, is located, with residual traffic compared to before.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

In the cities located in the south of Ukraine, there were clear Internet disruptions. The Russians laid siege to Mariupol on February 24. Energy infrastructure strikes and shutdowns had an impact on local networks and Internet traffic, which fell to minimal levels by March 1. Estimates indicate that 95% of the buildings in the city were destroyed, and by mid-May, the city was fully under Russian control. While there was some increase in traffic by the end of April, it reached only ~22% of what it was before the war’s start.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

When looking at Ukrainian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or the autonomous systems (ASNs) they use, we observed more localized disruptions in certain regions during the first months of the war, but recovery was almost always swift. AS6849 (Ukrtel) experienced problems with very short-term outages in mid-March. AS13188 (Triolan), which services Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv, was another provider experiencing problems (they reported a cyberattack on March 9), as could be observed in the next chart:

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

We did not observe a clear national outage in Ukraine’s main ISP, AS15895 (Kyivstar) until the October-November attacks on energy infrastructure, which also shows some early resilience of Ukrainian networks.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive and its Internet impact

As Russian troops retreated from the northern front in Ukraine, they shifted their efforts to gain ground in the east (Battle of Donbas) and south (occupation of the Kherson region) after late April. This resulted in Internet disruptions and traffic shifts, which are discussed in more detail in a section below. However, Internet traffic in the Kherson region was intermittent and included outages after May, given the battle for Internet control. News reports in June revealed that ISP workers damaged their own equipment to thwart Russia’s efforts to control the Ukrainian Internet.

Before the September Ukrainian counteroffensive, another example of the war’s impact on a city’s Internet traffic occurred during the summer, when Russian troops seized Lysychansk in eastern Ukraine in early July after what became known as the Battle of Lysychansk. Internet traffic in Lysychansk clearly decreased after the war started. That slide continues during the intense fighting that took place after April, which led to most of the city’s population leaving. By May, traffic was almost residual (with a mid-May few days short term increase).

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

In early September the Ukrainian counteroffensive took off in the east, although the media initially reported a south offensive in Kherson Oblast that was a “deception” move. The Kherson offensive only came to fruition in late October and early November. Ukraine was able to retake in September over 500 settlements and 12,000 square kilometers of territory in the Kharkiv region. At that time, there were Internet outages in several of those settlements.

In response to the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive, Russian airstrikes caused power outages and Internet disruptions in the region. That was the case in Kharkiv on September 11, 12, and 13. The figure below shows a 12-hour near-complete outage on September 11, followed by two other periods of drop in traffic.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

When nuclear inspectors arrive, so do Internet outages

In the Zaporizhzhia region, there were also outages. On September 1, 2022, the day the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors arrived at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Enerhodar, there were Internet outages in two local ASNs that service the area: AS199560 (Engrup) and AS197002 (OOO Tenor). Those outages lasted until September 10, as shown in the charts below.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

More broadly, the city of Enerhodar, where the nuclear power plant is located, experienced a four-day outage after September 6.

Mid-September traffic drop in Crimea

In mid-September, following Ukraine’s counteroffensive, there were questions as to when Crimea might be targeted by Ukrainian forces, with news reports indicating that there was an evacuation of the Russian population from Crimea around September 13. We saw a clear drop in traffic on that Tuesday, compared with the previous day, as seen in the map of Crimea below (red is decrease in traffic, green is increase).

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

October brings energy infrastructure attacks and country-wide disruptions

As we have seen, the Russian air strikes targeting critical energy infrastructure began in September as a retaliation to Ukraine’s counteroffensive. The following month, the Crimean Bridge explosion on Saturday, October 8 (when a truck-borne bomb destroyed part of the bridge) led to more air strikes that affected networks and Internet traffic across Ukraine.

On Monday, October 10, Ukraine woke up to air strikes on energy infrastructure and experienced severe electricity and Internet outages. At 07:35 UTC, traffic in the country was 35% below its usual level compared with the previous week and only fully recovered more than 24 hours later. The impact was particularly significant in regions like Kharkiv, where traffic was down by around 80%, and Lviv, where it dropped by about 60%. The graph below shows how new air strikes in Lviv Oblast the following day affected Internet traffic.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

There were clear disruptions in Internet connectivity in several regions on October 17, but also on October 20, when the destruction of several power stations in Kyiv resulted in a 25% drop in Internet traffic from Kyiv City as compared to the two previous weeks. It lasted 12 hours, and was followed the next day by a shorter partial outage as seen in the graph below.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

In late October, according to Ukrainian officials, 30% of Ukraine’s power stations were destroyed. Self-imposed power limitations because of this destruction resulted in drops in Internet traffic observed in places like Kyiv and the surrounding region.

The start of a multi-week Internet disruption in Kherson Oblast can be seen in the graph below, showing ~70% lower traffic than in previous weeks. The disruption began on Saturday, October 22, when Ukrainians were gaining ground in the Kherson region.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

Traffic began to return after Ukrainian forces took Kherson city on November 11, 2022. The graph below shows a week-over-week comparison for Kherson Oblast for the weeks of November 7, November 28, and December 19 for better visualization in the chart while showing the evolution through a seven-week period.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

Ongoing strikes and Internet disruptions

Throughout the rest of the year and into 2023, Ukraine has continued to face intermittent Internet disruptions. On November 23, 2022, the country experienced widespread power outages after Russian strikes, causing a nearly 50% decrease in Internet traffic in Ukraine. This disruption lasted for almost a day and a half, further emphasizing the ongoing impact of the conflict on Ukraine’s infrastructure.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

Although there was a recovery after that late November outage, only a few days later traffic seemed closer to normal levels. Below is a chart of the week-over-week evolution of Internet traffic in Ukraine at both a national and local level during that time:

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

In Kyiv Oblast:

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

In the Odessa region:

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

And Kharkiv (where a December 16 outage is also clear — in the green line):

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

On December 16, there was another country-level Internet disruption caused by air strikes targeting energy infrastructure. Traffic at a national level dropped as much as 13% compared with the previous week, but Ukrainian networks were even more affected. AS13188 (Triolan) had a 70% drop in traffic, and AS15895 (Kyivstar) a 40% drop, both shown in the figures below.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

In January 2023, air strikes caused additional Internet disruptions. One such recent event was in Odessa, where traffic dropped as low as 54% compared with the previous week during an 18-hour disruption.

A cyber war with global impact

“Shields Up” on cyber attacks

The US government and the FBI issued warnings in March to all citizens, businesses, and organizations in the country, as well as allies and partners, to be aware of the need to “enhance cybersecurity.” The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) launched the Shields Up initiative, noting that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could impact organizations both within and beyond the region.” The UK and Japan, among others, also issued warnings.

Below, we discuss Web Application Firewall (WAF) mitigations and DDoS attacks. A WAF helps protect web applications by filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic between a web application and the Internet. A WAF is a protocol layer 7 defense (in the OSI model), and is not designed to defend against all types of attacks. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are cyber attacks that aim to take down Internet properties and make them unavailable for users.

Cyber attacks rose 1,300% in Ukraine by early March

The charts below are based on normalized data, and show threats mitigated by our WAF.

Mitigated application-layer threats blocked by our WAF skyrocketed after the war started on February 24. Mitigated requests were 105% higher on Monday, February 28 than in the previous (pre-war) Monday, and peaked on March 8, reaching 1,300% higher than pre-war levels.

Between February 2022 and February 2023, an average of 10% of all traffic to Ukraine was mitigations of potential attacks.

The graph below shows the daily percentage of application layer traffic to Ukraine that Cloudflare mitigated as potential attacks. In early March, 30% of all traffic was mitigated. This fell in April, and remained low for several months, but it picked up in early September around the time of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in east and south Ukraine. The peak was reached on October 29 when DDoS attack traffic constituted 39% of total traffic to Cloudflare’s Ukrainian customer websites.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

This trend is more evident when looking at all traffic to sites on the “.ua” top-level domain (from Cloudflare’s perspective). The chart below shows that DDoS attack traffic accounted for over 80% of all traffic by early March 2022. The first clear spikes occurred on February 16 and 19, with around 25% of traffic mitigated. There was no moment of rest after the war started, except towards the end of November and December, but the attacks resumed just before Christmas. An average of 13% of all traffic to “.ua”, between February 2022 and February 2023 was mitigations of potential attacks. The following graph provides a comprehensive view of DDoS application layer attacks on “.ua” sites:

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

Moving on to types of mitigations of product groups that were used (related to “.ua” sites), as seen in the next chart, around 57% were done by the ruleset which automatically detects and mitigates HTTP DDoS attacks (DDoS Mitigation), 31% were being mitigated by firewall rules put in place (WAF), and 10% were blocking requests based on our IP threat reputation database (IP Reputation).

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

It’s important to note that WAF rules in the graph above are also associated with custom firewall rules created by customers to provide a more tailored protection. “DDoS Mitigation” (application layer DDoS protection) and “Access Rules” (rate limiting) are specifically used for DDoS protection.

In contrast to the first graph shown in this section, which looked at mitigated attack traffic targeting Ukraine, we can also look at mitigated attack traffic originating in Ukraine. The graph below also shows that the share of mitigated traffic from Ukraine also increased considerably after the invasion started.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

Top attacked industries: from government to news media

The industries sectors that had a higher share of WAF mitigations were government administration, financial services, and the media, representing almost half of all WAF mitigations targeting Ukraine during 2022.

Looking at DDoS attacks, there was a surge in attacks on media and publishing companies during 2022 in Ukraine. Entities targeting Ukrainian companies appeared to be focused on information-related websites. The top five most attacked industries in the Ukraine in the first two quarters of 2022 were all in broadcasting, Internet, online media, and publishing, accounting for almost 80% of all DDoS attacks targeting Ukraine.

In a more focused look at the type of websites Cloudflare has protected throughout the war, the next two graphs provide a view of mitigated application layer attacks by the type of “.ua” sites we helped to protect. In the first days of the war, mitigation spikes were observed at a news service, a TV channel, a government website, and a bank.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

In July, spikes in mitigations we observed across other types of “.ua” websites, including food delivery, e-commerce, auto parts, news, and government.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

More recently, in February 2023, the spikes in mitigations were somewhat similar to what we saw one year ago, including electronics, e-commerce, IT, and education websites.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

12.6% of network-layer traffic was DDoS activity in Q1 2022

Network-layer (layer 3 and 4) traffic is harder to attribute to a specific domain or target because IP addresses are shared across different customers. Looking at network-level DDoS traffic hitting our Kyiv data center, we saw peaks of DDoS traffic higher than before the war in early March, but they were much higher in June and August.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

In our Q1 2022 DDoS report, we also noted that 12.6% of Ukraine’s traffic was DDoS activity, compared with 1% in the previous quarter, a 1,160% quarter-over-quarter increase.

Several of our quarterly DDoS reports from 2022 include attack trends related to the war in Ukraine, with quarter over quarter interactive comparisons.

Network re-routing in Kherson

On February 24, 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast region. The city of Kherson was captured on March 2, as the first major city and only regional capital to be captured by Russian forces during the initial invasion. The Russian occupation of Kherson Oblast continued until Ukrainian forces resumed control on November 11, after launching a counteroffensive at the end of August.

On May 4, 2022, we published Tracking shifts in Internet connectivity in Kherson, Ukraine, a blog post that explored a re-routing event that impacted AS47598 (Khersontelecom), a telecommunications provider in Kherson Oblast. Below, we summarize this event, and explore similar activity across other providers in Kherson that has taken place since then.

On May 1, 2022, we observed a shift in routing for the IPv4 prefix announced by Ukrainian network AS47598 (Khersontelecom). During April, it reached the Internet through several other Ukrainian network providers, including AS12883 (Vega Telecom) and AS3326 (Datagroup). However, after the shift, its routing path now showed a Russian network, AS201776 (Miranda-Media), as the sole upstream provider. With traffic from KhersonTelecom passing through a Russian network, it was subject to the restrictions and limitations imposed on any traffic transiting Russian networks, including content filtering.

The flow of traffic from Khersontelecom before and after May 1, with rerouting through Russian network provider Miranda-Media, is illustrated in the chart below. This particular re-routing event was short-lived, as a routing update for AS47598 on May 4 saw it return to reaching the Internet through other Ukrainian providers.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

As a basis for our analysis, we started with a list of 15 Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) belonging to networks in Kherson Oblast. Using that list, we analyzed routing information collected by route-views2 over the past year, from February 1, 2022, to February 15, 2023. route-views2 is a BGP route collector run by the University of Oregon Route Views Project. Note that with respect to the discussions of ASNs in this and the following section, we are treating them equally, and have not specifically factored estimated user population into these analyses.

The figure below illustrates the result of this analysis, showing that re-routing of Kherson network providers (listed along the y-axis) through Russian upstream networks was fairly widespread, and for some networks, has continued into 2023. During the analysis time frame, there were three primary Russian networks that appeared as upstream providers: AS201776 (Miranda-Media), AS52091 (Level-MSK Ltd.), and AS8492 (OBIT Ltd.).

Within the graph, black bars indicate periods when the ASN effectively disappeared from the Internet; white segments indicate the ASN was dependent on other Ukraine networks as immediate upstreams; and red indicates the presence of Russian networks in the set of upstream providers. The intensity of the red shading corresponds to the percentage of announced prefixes for which a Russian network provider is present in the routing path as observed from networks outside Ukraine. Bright red shading, equivalent to “1” in the legend, indicates the presence of a Russian provider in all routing paths for announced prefixes.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

In the blog post linked above, we referenced an outage that began on April 30. This is clearly visible in the figure as a black bar that runs for several days across all the listed ASNs. In this instance, AS47598 (KhersonTelecom) recovered a day later, but was sending traffic through AS201776 (Miranda-Media), a Russian provider, as discussed above.

Another Ukrainian network, AS49168 (Brok-X), recovered from the outage on May 2, and was also sending traffic through Miranda-Media. By May 4, most of the other Kherson networks recovered from the outage, and both AS47598 and AS49168 returned to using Ukrainian networks as immediate upstream providers. Routing remained “normal” until May 30. Then, a more widespread shift to routing traffic through Russian providers began, although it appears that this shift was preceded by a brief outage for a few networks. For the most part, this re-routing lasted through the summer and into October. Some networks saw a brief outage on October 17, but most stopped routing directly through Russia by October 22.

However, this shift away from Russia was followed by periods of extended outages. KhersonTelecom suffered such an outage, and has remained offline since October, except for the first week of November when all of its traffic routed through Russia. Many other networks rejoined the Internet in early December, relying mostly on other Ukrainian providers for Internet connectivity. However, since early December, AS204485 (PE Berislav Cable Television), AS56359 (CHP Melnikov Roman Sergeevich), and AS49465 (Teleradiocompany RubinTelecom Ltd.) have continued to use Miranda-Media as an upstream provider, in addition to experiencing several brief outages. In addition, over the last several months, AS25082 (Viner Telecom) has used both a Ukrainian network and Miranda-Media as upstream providers.

Internet resilience in Ukraine

In the context of the Internet, “resilience” refers to the ability of a network to operate continuously in a manner that is highly resistant to disruption. This includes the ability of a network to: (1) operate in a degraded mode if damaged, (2) rapidly recover if failure does occur, and (3) scale to meet rapid or unpredictable demands. Throughout the Russia-Ukraine conflict, media coverage (VICE, Bloomberg, Washington Post) has highlighted the work done in Ukraine to repair damaged fiber-optic cables and mobile network infrastructure to keep the country online. This work has been critically important to maintaining the resilience of Ukrainian Internet infrastructure.

According to PeeringDB, as of February 2023, there are 25 Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in Ukraine and 50 interconnection facilities. (An IXP may span multiple physical facilities.) Within this set of IXPs, Autonomous Systems (ASes) belonging to international providers are currently present in over half of them. The number of facilities, IXPs, and international ASes present in Ukraine points to a resilient interconnection fabric, with multiple locations for both domestic and international providers to exchange traffic.

To better understand these international interconnections, we first analyze the connectivity of ASes in Ukraine, and we classify the links to domestic networks (links where both ASes are registered in Ukraine) and international networks (links between ASes in Ukraine and ASes outside Ukraine). To determine which ASes are domestic in Ukraine, we can use information from the extended delegation reports from the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), the Regional Internet Registry that covers Ukraine. We also parsed collected BGP data to extract the AS-level links between Ukrainian ASes and ASes registered in a different country, and we consider these the international connectivity of the domestic ASes.

A March 2022 article in The Economist noted that “For one thing, Ukraine boasts an unusually large number of internet-service providers—by one reckoning the country has the world’s fourth-least-concentrated Internet market. This means the network has few choke points, so is hard to disable.” As of the writing of this blog post, there are 2,190 ASes registered in Ukraine (UA ASes), and 1,574 of those ASes appear in the BGP routing table as active. These counts support the article’s characterization, and below we discuss several additional observations that reinforce Ukraine’s Internet resilience.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

The figure above is a cumulative distribution function showing the fraction of domestic Ukrainian ASes that have direct connections to international networks. In February 2023, approximately 50% had more than one (100) international link, while approximately 10% had more than 10, and approximately 2% had 100 or more. Although these numbers have dropped slightly over the last year, they underscore the lack of centralized choke points in the Ukrainian Internet.

For the networks with international connectivity, we can also look at the distribution of “next-hop” countries – countries with which those international networks are associated. (Note that some networks may have a global footprint, and for these, the associated country is the one recorded in their autonomous system registration.) Comparing the choropleth maps below illustrates how this set of countries, and their fraction of international paths, have changed between February 2022 and February 2023. The data underlying these maps shows that international connectivity from Ukraine is distributed across 18 countries — unsurprisingly, mostly in Europe.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

In February 2022, these countries/locations accounted for 77% of Ukraine’s next-hop international paths. The top four all had 7.8% each. However, in February 2023, the top 10 next-hop countries/locations dropped slightly to 76% of international paths. While just a slight change from the previous year, the set of countries/locations and many of their respective fractions saw considerable change.

February 2022 February 2023
1 Germany 7.85% Russia 11.62%
2 Netherlands 7.85% Germany 11.43%
3 United Kingdom 7.83% Hong Kong 8.38%
4 Hong Kong 7.81% Poland 7.93%
5 Sweden 7.77% Italy 7.75%
6 Romania 7.72% Turkey 6.86%
7 Russia 7.67% Bulgaria 6.20%
8 Italy 7.64% Netherlands 5.31%
9 Poland 7.60% United Kingdom 5.30%
10 Hungary 7.54% Sweden 5.26%

Russia’s share grew by 50% year to 11.6%, giving it the biggest share of next-hop ASes. Germany also grew to account for more than 11% of paths.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

Satellite Internet connectivity

Cloudflare observed a rapid growth in Starlink’s ASN (AS14593) traffic to Ukraine during 2022 and into 2023. Between mid-March and mid-May, Starlink’s traffic in the country grew over 530%, and continued to grow from mid-May up until mid-November, increasing nearly 300% over that six-month period — from mid-March to mid-December the growth percentage was over 1600%. After that, traffic stabilized and even dropped a bit during January 2023.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

Our data shows that between November and December 2022, Starlink represented between 0.22% and 0.3% of traffic from Ukraine, but that number is now lower than 0.2%.

One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience

Conclusion

One year in, the war in Ukraine has taken an unimaginable humanitarian toll. The Internet in Ukraine has also become a battleground, suffering attacks, re-routing, and disruptions. But it has proven to be exceptionally resilient, recovering time and time again from each setback.

We know that the need for a secure and reliable Internet there is more critical than ever. At Cloudflare, we’re committed to continue providing tools that protect Internet services from cyber attack, improve security for those operating in the region, and share information about Internet connectivity and routing inside Ukraine.

An early look at Thanksgiving 2022 Internet trends

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/an-early-look-at-thanksgiving-2022-internet-trends/

An early look at Thanksgiving 2022 Internet trends

“The more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for.”

— Norman Vincent Peale, American author  

The turkey. The sweet potatoes. The stuffing. The pumpkin pie. Yesterday, November 24, 2022, was Thanksgiving Day in the US. A time for families and loved ones to be together and thankful, according to the tradition. Last year, we saw how the US paused shopping (and browsing) for Thanksgiving. So, how was it this year? Not only did we see Internet traffic go down (by 13%) during Thanksgiving dinner, but it was much higher than usual the day before and the day after (the Black Friday effect… so far). There was also a clear, but short, Thanksgiving day effect on e-commerce DNS trends.

We’ll have to wait to see what Black Friday looks like.

Let’s start with Internet traffic at the time of Thanksgiving dinner. Although every family is different, a 2018 survey of US consumers showed that for 42% early afternoon (between 13:00 and 15:00 is the preferred time to sit at the table and start to dig in). But 16:00 seems to be the “correct time” — The Atlantic explains why.

That said, Cloudflare Radar shows that between 21:00 and 01:00 UTC (we use that as the standard timezone in Radar) there was a clear drop in Internet traffic, mostly between 21:00 and 22:00 UTC, when traffic dropped 13%, compared with the week before. That time period is “translated” for the East Coast to between 16:00 and 20:00 EST and for the West Coast the time between 13:00 to 17:00 PST. Similar to what we saw last year.

An early look at Thanksgiving 2022 Internet trends

Radar also allows anyone to focus on the last 24 hours and check the traffic volume change compared with the previous period. The more granular view in the next graph shows not only the 13% drop during Thanksgiving dinner, but also the clear increase after. At around 01:00 EST (22:00 PST), traffic was 15% higher than the day before, and today, November 25, Black Friday morning (08:00 EST, 05:00 PST), was growing ~16% more in traffic at 09:00 EST (06:00 PST).

An early look at Thanksgiving 2022 Internet trends

It’s a similar perspective when we look at the last seven days, a filter that also shows the night before Thanksgiving in the US, traffic was 15% higher than the week before at around 01:00-03:00 EST (22:00-00:00 PST). And there’s a general increase in traffic this week, probably related to the fact it is also “Black Friday Week” (more on e-commerce trends at the end).

An early look at Thanksgiving 2022 Internet trends

In terms of Internet traffic growth (made by humans, not bots) in November, there’s a clear increase throughout the month, but mostly this week. The next chart aggregates traffic by day. So far, Tuesday, November 22, 2022, was the day of the month with most traffic in the US — +13% than what we saw on Tuesday, November 1.

An early look at Thanksgiving 2022 Internet trends

It’s also clear in the previous graph that weekends in the US have less traffic, especially Saturdays, but that Thanksgiving Day was the one with less traffic of the past two weeks — 10% less traffic than the same day the week before.

We’ve been focused on human Internet traffic. Bots, on the other hand, are not that interested in the Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and there was actually more bot traffic in the US last week than in this one. So far.

To wrap up this Internet traffic section, let’s look at mobile device trends. In the last four weeks, we saw an average of 48% of Internet traffic in the US coming from mobile devices. But on Thanksgiving Day that average was 55%. That was actually the day in November when people in the US were most online using their mobile devices.

An early look at Thanksgiving 2022 Internet trends

Here’s the view that shows the mobile percentage difference from the past two weeks, with an up to 9% increase (compared with the previous week) in mobile devices’ predominance in Internet traffic, between 10:00 and 16:00 EST (07:00-13:00 PST).

An early look at Thanksgiving 2022 Internet trends

E-commerce interest: growing (but with a Thanksgiving dip)

Now, let’s look at DNS query trends (from our globally used 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver) to e-commerce websites in the US. First, the Thanksgiving Day effect.

Aggregating several e-commerce domains, we can see not only that there are several spikes in the last two weeks, but that during Thanksgiving, there was a clear dip in DNS traffic between 15:00 and 17:00 EST (12:00-14:00 PST). How much? At 17:00 EST, Thanksgiving Day, there was 13% less DNS traffic than in the previous week.

An early look at Thanksgiving 2022 Internet trends

We have been following e-commerce trends this week on our Cloudflare Radar Twitter account. And, so far, November 14, 21 and 22, were the days that generated most interest.

An early look at Thanksgiving 2022 Internet trends

Using a smoothed seven day rolling average to those e-commerce domains (only in the US), the growth trend for the past 30 days is even more clear in the past two weeks (after a clear dip in early November). From November 13 to November 22, the rolling average grew ~5%.

An early look at Thanksgiving 2022 Internet trends

Last year, Cyber Monday was the biggest day for online shopping, in terms of DNS queries that we saw. Next week, we’ll see how it was this year.

Japan: A different kind of Thanksgiving

Also this week, Japan had its Labor Thanksgiving, an annual public holiday that was celebrated on Wednesday, November 23, 2022. And there was also a clear impact, but because, in Japan, this is a day full of events held throughout the country, there was an increase in traffic during the day. How much?

The peak was at around 01:00 UTC (10:00 in local time), when Internet traffic was 60% higher than in the previous week (and it continued to remain high during Labor Thanksgiving Day).

An early look at Thanksgiving 2022 Internet trends

You can check Cloudflare Radar, but also our Twitter account where we continue to see country patterns related to the FIFA World Cup in Qatar (Internet traffic does shift, depending on the country, when national teams are playing), but also e-commerce DNS trends.

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-the-brazilian-presidential-elections-affected-internet-traffic/

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

Brasil, sei lá
Ou o meu coração se engana
Ou uma terra igual não há
— From Tom Jobim’s song, Brasil Nativo

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

Brazil’s recent presidential election got significant attention from both global and national media outlets, not only because of the size of the country, but also because of premature allegations of electoral fraud. The first round of the Brazilian 2022 general election was held on October 2, and the runoff was held on Sunday, October 30. With 124 million votes counted, former president Lula da Silva (2003-2010) won with 50.9% of the votes, beating incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, who had 49.1% of the votes.

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic
The final results of the elections as published by the official Tribunal Super Eleitoral, with more than 124 million votes counted.)

Using Cloudflare’s data, we can explore the impact that this election had on Internet traffic patterns in Brazil, as well as interest in content from election-related websites, news organizations, social media platforms, and video platforms.

Here are a few highlights: while the runoff generated much more interest to election related websites (we actually have a view to DNS queries, a proxy to websites), the first round showed bigger increases in traffic to news organizations.

For the candidate’s domains, Lula’s win had the higher impact.

Also: official results came earlier on the runoff than the first round, and spikes in traffic were higher earlier that day (October 30).

(Note: we’re using local times — that means UTC-3, that is related to the more populated regions of Brazil — in this blog, although some charts have x-axis UTC).

Let’s start by looking at general Internet traffic in Brazil.

On election days, traffic goes down (during the day)

Using Cloudflare Radar, we can see something that has also been observed in other countries that hold Sunday elections: when most people are getting outside to vote, Internet traffic goes down (in comparison with previous Sundays). We saw this in the two rounds of the Presidential elections in France back in April 2022, in Portugal’s legislative elections in January 2022 and now, in Brazil.

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

We can also compare Sundays in October. There were five weekends. The two that had elections show the same pattern of lower traffic during the day, as seen in the previous chart. Comparing the two election days, there was a bigger drop in traffic on October 30 (down 21% at around 18:00 local time), than on October 2 (down 10% at around 20:00). Related or not, there was a bigger turnout on the runoff (124 million votes) than on the first round (123 million). Here’s the view on October 30:

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

And here’s October 2:

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

A more clear view in comparing the October weekends, and where you can see how the October 2 and 30 Sundays have the same pattern and different from the others three of the month, is this one (bear in mind that the x-axis is showing UTC time, it’s -3 hours in Brazil):

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

If we look at the main network providers (ASNs) in Brazil, the trend is the same. Claro (AS28573) also shows the drop in traffic on October 30, as does Telefonica (AS27699):

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

Here’s Telefonica:

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

We observed a similar impact from the October 30 runoff election to traffic from different states in Brazil, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Norte, Minas Gerais, and Bahia.

Mobile device usage greater on weekends (and on election days)

When we look at the share of Brazil’s Internet traffic from mobile devices during October, we find that the highest percentages were on October 2 (first round of the elections, 66.3%), October 9 (66.4%) and October 30 (runoff election, 65%). We’ve seen this in other elections, an increase in mobile device traffice, so this seems to follow the same trend.

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

This chart also shows how mobile device usage in Brazil is at its highest on the weekends (all the main spikes for percentage of mobile devices are over the weekend, and more on Sundays).

Now, let’s look at anonymized and aggregated DNS traffic data from our 1.1.1.1 resolver. This data provides a proxy for traffic to, and thus interest in, different categories of sites from users in Brazil around the election.

Brazil has government websites related to elections, but also its own Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (Electoral Superior Court) that includes a website and app with live updates on the results of the elections for everyone to check. Looking at those related domains and using mean hourly traffic in September as a baseline, we can see that the October 2 first round spiked to 16x more DNS queries at 20:00 local time. However, DNS query traffic during the runoff election peaked at 18:00 local time on October 30 with 17.4x more DNS traffic as compared to the September baseline.

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

We can look more closely at each one of those two election days. On October 2, traffic had its first significant increase at around 17:00 local time, reaching 15x more requests to election-related domains as compared to the September baseline. This initial peak occurred at the same time the polling stations were closing. However, the peak that day, at 16x above baseline, was reached at 20:00 local time, as seen in the figure below.

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

On Sunday, October 30, 2022, the pattern is similar, although the peak was reached earlier, given that results started to arrive earlier than on the first round. The peak was reached at around 18:00 local time, with request traffic 17.4x above baseline.

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

As seen in the figure below, Lula first led in the official results at 18:45 local time, with votes from 67% of the polling stations counted at that time. Around 20:00 Lula was considered the winner (the peak seen in the previous chart was at that time).

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

Candidate websites: in the end, winner takes all?

For Lula-related domains, there are clear spikes around the first round of elections on October 2. A 13x spike was observed on October 1 at around 21:00 local time. Two notable spikes were observed on October 2 — one at 16.7x above baseline at 09:00 local time, and the other at 10.7x above baseline at 21:00 local time. During the October 30 runoff election, only one clear spike was observed. The spike, at 16.7x above baseline, occurred at around 20:00, coincident with the time Lula was being announced as the winner.

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

For Bolsonaro-related domains, we observed a different pattern. Increased traffic as compared to the baseline is visible in the days leading up to the first round election, reaching 10x on September 30. On October 2, a 8x spike above baseline was seen at 18:00 local time. However, the two most significant spikes seen over the course of the month were observed on October 16, at 20x above baseline, a few hours after the first Lula-Bolsonaro television debate, and on October 25, at around 20:00, at 22x above baseline. That was the last week of campaigning before the October 30 runoff and when several polling predictions were announced. The second and last Bolsonaro-Lula debate was on October 28, and there’s a spike at 22:00 to Lula’s websites, and a smaller but also clear one at 21:00 to Bolsonaro’s websites).

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

News websites: more interest in the first round

With official election results being available more rapidly, DNS traffic for Brazilian news organization websites peaked much earlier in the evening than what we saw in France, for example, where more definitive election results arrived much later on election day. But another interesting trend here is how the first round, on October 2, had 9.1x more DNS traffic (compared with the September baseline), than what we saw during the runoff on October 30 (6.1x).

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

The way the results arrived faster also had an impact on the time of the peak, occurring at around 19:00 local time on October 30, as compared to around 20:00 on October 2.

At 19:45 local time on October 30, Lula was already the winner with more than 98% of the votes counted. After 20:00 there was a clear drop in DNS traffic to news organizations.

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

On October 2, it was only around 22:00 that it became official that there would be a runoff between Lula and Bolsonaro. Peak request volume was reached at 20:00 (9x), but traffic remained high (8x) at around 21:00 and until 22:00, like the following chart shows:

How the Brazilian Presidential elections affected Internet traffic

Conclusion: Real world events impact the Internet

Cloudflare Radar, our tool for Internet insights, can provide a unique perspective on how major global or national events impact the Internet. It is interesting to not only see that a real world event can impact Internet traffic (and different types of websites) for a whole country, but also see how much that impact is represented at specific times. It’s all about human behavior at relevant moments in time, like elections as a collective event is.

Past examples of this include important presidential elections, the Super Bowl, the Oscars, Eurovision, never before seen views of the universe from a telescope , the holiday shopping season, or religious events such as Ramadan.

You can keep an eye on these trends using Cloudflare Radar.

How to enable Private Access Tokens in iOS 16 and stop seeing CAPTCHAs

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-enable-private-access-tokens-in-ios-16-and-stop-seeing-captchas/

How to enable Private Access Tokens in iOS 16 and stop seeing CAPTCHAs

How to enable Private Access Tokens in iOS 16 and stop seeing CAPTCHAs

You go to a website or service, but before access is granted, there’s a visual challenge that forces you to select bikes, buses or traffic lights in a set of images. That can be an exasperating experience. Now, if you have iOS 16 on your iPhone, those days could be over and are just a one-time toggle enabled away.

CAPTCHA = “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”

In 2021, we took direct steps to end the madness that wastes humanity about 500 years per day called CAPTCHAs, that have been making sure you’re human and not a bot. In August 2022, we announced Private Access Tokens. With that, we’re able to eliminate CAPTCHAs on iPhones, iPads and Macs (and more to come) with open privacy-preserving standards.

On September 12, iOS 16 became generally available (iPad 16 and macOS 13 should arrive in October) and on the settings of your device there’s a toggle that can enable the Private Access Token (PAT) technology that will eliminate the need for those CAPTCHAs, and automatically validate that you are a real human visiting a site. If you already have iOS 16, here’s what you should do to confirm that the toggle is “on” (usually it is):

Settings > Apple ID > Password & Security > Automatic Verification (should be enabled)

How to enable Private Access Tokens in iOS 16 and stop seeing CAPTCHAs

What will you get? A completely invisible, private way to validate yourself, and for a website, a way to automatically verify that real users are visiting the site without the horrible CAPTCHA user experience.

Visitors using operating systems that support these tokens, including the upcoming versions of iPad and macOS, can now prove they’re human without completing a CAPTCHA or giving up personal data.

Let’s recap from our August 2022 announcement blog post what this means for different users:

If you’re an Internet user:

  • We’re helping make your mobile web experience more pleasant and more private.
  • You won’t see a CAPTCHA on a supported iOS or Mac device (other devices coming soon!) accessing the Cloudflare network.

If you’re a web or application developer:

  • You’ll know your users are humans coming from an authentic device and signed application, verified by the device vendor directly.
  • And you’ll validate users without maintaining a cumbersome SDK.

If you’re a Cloudflare customer:

  • You don’t have to do anything! Cloudflare will automatically ask for and use Private Access Tokens when using Managed Challenge.
  • Your visitors won’t see a CAPTCHA.

It’s all about simplicity, without compromising on privacy. The work done over a year was a collaboration between Cloudflare and Apple, Google, and other industry leaders to extend the Privacy Pass protocol with support for a new cryptographic token.

These tokens simplify application security for developers and security teams, and obsolete legacy, third-party SDK-based approaches for determining if a human is using a device. They work for browsers, APIs called by browsers, and APIs called within apps. After Apple announced in August that PATs would be incorporated into iOS 16, iPad 16, and macOS 13, the process of ending CAPTCHAs got a big boost. And we expect additional vendors to announce support in the near future.

Cloudflare has already incorporated PATs into our Managed Challenge platform, so any customer using this feature will automatically take advantage of this new technology to improve the browsing experience for supported devices.

In our August in-depth blog post about PATs, you can learn more about how CAPTCHAs don’t work in mobile environments and PATs remove the need for them, and how when sites can’t challenge a visitor with a CAPTCHA, they collect private data.

Improved privacy

In that blog post, we also explain how Private Access Tokens vastly improve privacy by validating without fingerprinting. So, by partnering with third parties like device manufacturers, who already have the data that would help us validate a device, we are able to abstract portions of the validation process, and confirm data without actually collecting, touching, or storing that data ourselves. Rather than interrogating a device directly, we ask the device vendor to do it for us.

Most customers won’t have to do anything to utilize Private Access Tokens. Why? To take advantage of PATs, all you have to do is choose Managed Challenge rather than Legacy CAPTCHA as a response option in a Firewall rule. More than 65% of Cloudflare customers are already doing this.

Now, if you have iOS 16 on your iPhone, it’s your turn.

Deep dives & how the Internet works

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/deep-dives-how-the-internet-works/

Deep dives & how the Internet works

Deep dives & how the Internet works

When August comes, for many, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s time to enjoy summer and/or vacations. Here are some deep dive reading suggestions from our Cloudflare Blog for any time, weather or time of the year. There’s also some reading material on how the Internet works, and a glimpse into our history.

To create the list (that goes beyond 2022), initially we asked inside the company for favorite blog posts. Many explained how a particular blog post made them want to work at Cloudflare (including some of those who have been at the company for many years). And then, we also heard from readers by asking the question on our Twitter account: “What’s your favorite blog post from the Cloudflare Blog and why?”

In early July (thinking of the July 4 US holiday) we did a sum up where some of the more recent blog posts were referenced. We’ve added a few to that list:

  • Eliminating CAPTCHAs on iPhones and Macs (✍️)
    How it works using open standards. On this topic, you can also read the detailed blog post from our research team, from 2021: Humanity wastes about 500 years per day on CAPTCHAs. It’s time to end this madness.
  • Optimizing TCP for high WAN throughput while preserving low latency (✍️)
    If you like networks, this is an in depth look of how we tune TCP parameters for low latency and high throughput.
  • Live-patching the Linux kernel (✍️)
    A detail focused blog focused on using eBPF. Code, Makefiles and more within.
  • Early Hints in the real world (✍️)  
    In depth data about it where we show how much faster the web is with it (in a Cloudflare, Google, and Shopify partnership).
  • Internet Explorer, we hardly knew ye (✍️)
    A look at the demise of Internet Explorer and the rise of the Edge browser (after Microsoft announced the end-of-life for IE).
  • When the window is not fully open, your TCP stack is doing more than you think (✍️)
    A recent deep dive shows how Linux manages TCP receive buffers and windows, and how to tune the TCP connection for the best speed. Similar blogs are: How to stop running out of ephemeral ports and start to love long-lived connections; Everything you ever wanted to know about UDP sockets but were afraid to ask.
  • How Ramadan shows up in Internet trends (✍️)
    What happens to the Internet traffic in countries where many observe Ramadan? Depending on the country, there are clear shifts and changing patterns in Internet use, particularly before dawn and after sunset. This is all coming from our Radar platform. We can see many human trends, from a relevant outage in a country (here’s the list of Q2 2022 disruptions), to events like elections, the Eurovision, the ‘Jubilee’ celebration or the James Webb Telescope pictures revelation.

2022, research focused

  • Hertzbleed attack (✍️)  
    A deep explainer where we compare a runner in a long distance race with how CPU frequency scaling leads to a nasty side channel affecting cryptographic algorithms. Don’t be confused with the older and impactful Heartbleed.
  • Future-proofing SaltStack (✍️)  
    A chronicle of our path of making the SaltStack system quantum-secure. In an extra post-quantum blog post, we highlight how we are preparing the Internet and our infrastructure for the arrival of quantum computers.
  • Unlocking QUIC’s proxying potential with MASQUE (✍️)
    A deep dive into QUIC transport protocol and a good up to date way to know more about it (related: HTTP usage trends).
  • HPKE: Standardizing public-key encryption (finally!) (✍️)  
    Two research groups have finally published the next reusable, and future-proof generation of (hybrid) public-key encryption (PKE) for Internet protocols and applications: Hybrid Public Key Encryption (HPKE).
  • Sizing Up Post-Quantum Signatures (✍️)  
    This blog (followed by this deep dive one that includes quotes from Ancient Greece) was highlighted by a reader as “life changing”. It shows the peculiar relationship between PQC (post-quantum cryptography) signatures and TLS (Transport Layer Security) size and connection quality. It’s research about how quantum computers could unlock the next age of innovation, and will break the majority of the cryptography used to protect our web browsing (more on that below). But it is also about how to make a website really fast.

If you like Twitter threads, here is a recent one from our Head of Cloudflare Research, Nick Sullivan, that explains in simple terms the way privacy on the Internet works and challenges in protecting it now and for the future.

This month we also did a full reading list/guide with our blog posts about all sorts of attacks (from DDoS to phishing, malware or ransomware) and how to stay protected in 2022.

How does it (the Internet) work

  • Cloudflare’s view of the Rogers Communications outage in Canada (✍️ 2022)
    One of the largest ISPs in Canada, Rogers Communications, had a huge outage on July 8, 2022, that lasted for more than 17 hours. From our view of the Internet, we show why we concluded it seemed caused by an internal error and how the Internet, being a network of networks, all bound together by BGP, was related to the disruption.
  • Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the Internet (✍️ 2021).
    “Facebook can’t be down, can it?”, we thought, for a second, on October 4, 2021. It was, and we had a deep dive about it, where BGP was also ‘king’.

Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity famously dictates that no known object can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum, which is 299,792 km/s.

  • Welcome to Speed Week and a Waitless Internet (✍️ 2021).
    There’s no object, as far as we, humans, know, that is faster than the speed of light. In this blog post you’ll get a sense of the physical limits of Internet speeds (“the speed of light is really slow”). How it all works through electrons through wires, lasers blasting data down fiber optic cables, and how building a waitless Internet is hard.
    We go on to explain the factors that go into building our fast global network: bandwidth, latency, reliability, caching, cryptography, DNS, preloading, cold starts, and more; and how Cloudflare zeroes in on the most powerful number there is: zero. And here’s a challenge, there are a few movies, books, board game references hidden in the post for you to find.

“People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it. Predicting the future is much too easy, anyway. You look at the people around you, the street you stand on, the visible air you breathe, and predict more of the same. To hell with more. I want better.”
Ray Bradbury, from Beyond 1984: The People Machines

  • Securing the post-quantum world (✍️ 2020).
    This one is more about the future of the Internet. We have many post-quantum related posts, including the recent standardization one (‘NIST’s pleasant post-quantum surprise’), but here you have an easy-to-understand explanation of a complex but crucial for the future of the Internet topic. More on those challenges and opportunities in 2022 here.
    The sum up is: “Quantum computers are coming that will have the ability to break the cryptographic mechanisms we rely on to secure modern communications, but there is hope”. For a quantum computing starting point, check: The Quantum Menace.
  • SAD DNS Explained (✍️ 2020).
    A 2020 attack against the Domain Name System (DNS) called SAD DNS (Side channel AttackeD DNS) leveraged features of the networking stack in modern operating systems. It’s a good excuse to explain how the DNS protocol and spoofing work, and how the industry can prevent it — another post expands on improving DNS privacy with Oblivious DoH in 1.1.1.1.
  • Privacy needs to be built into the Internet (✍️ 2020)
    A bit of history is always interesting and of value (at least for me). To launch one of our Privacy Weeks, in 2020, here’s a general view to the three different phases of the Internet. Until the 1990s the race was for connectivity. With the introduction of SSL in 1994, the Internet moved to a second phase where security became paramount (it helped create the dotcom rush and the secure, online world we live in today). Now, it’s all about the Phase 3 of the Internet we’re helping to build: always on, always secure, always private.
  • 50 Years of The Internet. Work in Progress to a Better Internet (✍️ 2019)
    In 2019, we were celebrating 50 years from when the very first network packet took flight from the Los Angeles campus at UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) building in Palo Alto. Those two California sites had kicked-off the world of packet networking, on the ARPANET, and of the modern Internet as we use and know it today. Here we go through some Internet history.
    This reminds me of this December 2021 conversation about how the Web began, 30 years earlier. Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming meets Dr. Ben Segal, early Internet pioneer and CERN’s first official TCP/IP Coordinator, and Francois Fluckiger, director of the CERN School of Computing. Here, we learn how the World Wide Web became an open source project.
  • Welcome to Crypto Week (✍️ 2018).
    If you want to know why cryptography is so important for the Internet, here’s a good place to start. The Internet, with all of its marvels in connecting people and ideas, needs an upgrade, and one of the tools that can make things better is cryptography. There’s also a more mathematical privacy pass protocol related perspective (that is the basis of the work to eliminate CAPTCHAs).
  • Why TLS 1.3 isn’t in browsers yet (✍️ 2017).
    It’s all about: “Upgrading a security protocol in an ecosystem as complex as the Internet is difficult. You need to update clients and servers and make sure everything in between continues to work correctly. The Internet is in the middle of such an upgrade right now.” More on that from 2021 here: Handshake Encryption: Endgame (an ECH update).
  • How to build your own public key infrastructure (✍️ 2015).
    A way of getting to know how a major part of securing a network as geographically diverse as Cloudflare’s is protecting data as it travels between datacenters. “Great security architecture requires a defense system with multiple layers of protection”. From the same year, here’s something about digital signatures being the bedrock of trust.
  • A (Relatively Easy To Understand) Primer on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (✍️ 2013).
    Also thinking of how the Internet will continue to work for years to come, here’s a very complex topic made simple about one of the most powerful but least understood types of cryptography in wide use.
  • Why Google Went Offline Today and a Bit about How the Internet Works (✍️ 2012).
    We had several similar blog posts over the years, but this 10-year old one from Tom Paseka set the tone on how we could give a good technical explanation for something that was impacting so many. Here ​​Internet routing, route leakages are discussed and it all ends on a relevant note: “Just another day in our ongoing efforts to #savetheweb.” Quoting from someone in the company for nine years: “This blog was the one that first got me interested in Cloudflare”.

Again, if you like Twitter threads, this recent Nick Sullivan one starts with an announcement (Cloudflare now allows experiments with post-quantum cryptography) and goes on explaining what some of the more relevant Internet acronyms mean. Example: TLS, or Transport Layer Security, it’s the ubiquitous encryption and authentication protocol that protects web requests online.

Blast from the past (some history)

A few also recently referenced blog posts from the past, some more technical than others.

  • Introducing DNS Resolver, 1.1.1.1 (not a joke) (✍️ 2018).
    The first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released, our DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1 — a recursive DNS service — was launched on April 1, 2018, and this is the technical explanation. With this offering, we started fixing the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. And, just this month, we’ve added privacy proofed features (a geolocation accuracy “pizza test” included).
  • Cloudflare goes InterPlanetary – Introducing Cloudflare’s IPFS Gateway (✍️ 2018).
    We introduced Cloudflare’s IPFS Gateway, an easy way to access content from the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). This served as the platform for many new, at the time, highly-reliable and security-enhanced web applications. It was the first product to be released as part of our Distributed Web Gateway project and is a different perspective from the traditional web.
    IPFS is a peer-to-peer file system composed of thousands of computers around the world, each of which stores files on behalf of the network. And, yes, it can be used as a method for a possible Mars (Moon, etc.) Internet in the future. About that, the same goes for code that will need to be running on Mars, something we mention about Workers here.
  • LavaRand in Production: The Nitty-Gritty Technical Details (✍️ 2017).
    Our lava lamps wall in the San Francisco office is much more than a wall of lava lamps (the YouTuber Tom Scott did a 2017 video about it) and in this blog we explain the in-depth look at the technical details (there’s a less technical one on how randomness in cryptography works).
  • Introducing Cloudflare Workers (✍️ 2017).
    There are several announcements each year, but this blog (associated with the explanation, Code Everywhere: Why We Built Cloudflare Workers) was referenced this week by some as one of those with a clear impact. It was when we started making Cloudflare’s network programmable. In 2018, Workers was available to everyone and, in 2019, we registered the trademark for The Network is the Computer®, to encompass how Cloudflare is using its network to pave the way for the future of the Internet.
  • What’s the story behind the names of CloudFlare’s name servers? (✍️ 2013)
    Another one referenced this week is the answer to the question we got often back in 2013: what the names of our nameservers mean. Here’s the story — there’s even an Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak tribute.

2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/2022-attacks-an-august-reading-list-to-go-shields-up/

2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”

2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”

In 2022, cybersecurity is a must-have for those who don’t want to take chances on getting caught in a cyberattack with difficult to deal consequences. And with a war in Europe (Ukraine) still going on, cyberwar also doesn’t show signs of stopping in a time when there never were so many people online, 4.95 billion in early 2022, 62.5% of the world’s total population (estimates say it grew around 4% during 2021 and 7.3% in 2020).

Throughout the year we, at Cloudflare, have been making new announcements of products, solutions and initiatives that highlight the way we have been preventing, mitigating and constantly learning, over the years, with several thousands of small and big cyberattacks. Right now, we block an average of 124 billion cyber threats per day. The more we deal with attacks, the more we know how to stop them, and the easier it gets to find and deal with new threats — and for customers to forget we’re there, protecting them.

In 2022, we have been onboarding many customers while they’re being attacked, something we know well from the past (Wikimedia/Wikipedia or Eurovision are just two case-studies of many, and last year there was a Fortune Global 500 company example we wrote about). Recently, we dealt and did a rundown about an SMS phishing attack.

Providing services for almost 20% of websites online and to millions of Internet properties and customers using our global network in more than 270 cities (recently we arrived to Guam) also plays a big role. For example, in Q1’22 Cloudflare blocked an average of 117 billion cyber threats each day (much more than in previous quarters).

Now that August is here, and many in the Northern Hemisphere are enjoying the summer and vacations, let’s do a reading list that is also a sum up focused on cyberattacks that also gives, by itself, some 2022 guide on this more than ever relevant area.

War & Cyberwar: Attacks increasing

But first, some context. There are all sorts of attacks, but they have been generally speaking increasing and just to give some of our data regarding DDoS attacks in 2022 Q2: ​​application-layer attacks increased by 72% YoY (Year over Year) and network-layer DDoS attacks increased by 109% YoY.

The US government gave “warnings” back in March, after the war in Ukraine started, to all in the country but also allies and partners to be aware of the need to “enhance cybersecurity”. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) created the Shields Up initiative, given how the “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could impact organizations both within and beyond the region”. The UK and Japan, among others, also issued warnings.

That said, here are the two first and more general about attacks reading list suggestions:

Shields up: free Cloudflare services to improve your cyber readiness (✍️)
After the war started and governments released warnings, we did this free Cloudflare services cyber readiness sum up blog post. If you’re a seasoned IT professional or a novice website operator, you can see a variety of services for websites, apps, or APIs, including DDoS mitigation and protection of teams or even personal devices (from phones to routers). If this resonates with you, this announcement of collaboration to simplify the adoption of Zero Trust for IT and security teams could also be useful: CrowdStrike’s endpoint security meets Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Services.

In Ukraine and beyond, what it takes to keep vulnerable groups online (✍️)
This blog post is focused on the eighth anniversary of our Project Galileo, that has been helping human-rights, journalism and non-profits public interest organizations or groups. We highlight the trends of the past year, including the dozens of organizations related to Ukraine that were onboarded (many while being attacked) since the war started. Between July 2021 and May 2022, we’ve blocked an average of nearly 57.9 million cyberattacks per day, an increase of nearly 10% over last year in a total of 18 billion attacks.

In terms of attack methods to Galileo protected organizations, the largest fraction (28%) of mitigated requests were classified as “HTTP Anomaly”, with 20% of mitigated requests tagged as SQL injection or SQLi attempts (to target databases) and nearly 13% as attempts to exploit specific CVEs (publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities) — you can find more insights about those here, including the Spring4Shell vulnerability, the Log4j or the Atlassian one.

And now, without further ado, here’s the full reading list/attacks guide where we highlight some blog posts around four main topics:

1. DDoS attacks & solutions

2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”
The most powerful botnet to date, Mantis.

Cloudflare mitigates 26 million request per second DDoS attack (✍️)
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) are the bread and butter of state-based attacks, and we’ve been automatically detecting and mitigating them. Regardless of which country initiates them, bots are all around the world and in this blog post you can see a specific example on how big those attacks can be (in this case the attack targeted a customer website using Cloudflare’s Free plan). We’ve named this most powerful botnet to date, Mantis.

That said, we also explain that although most of the attacks are small, e.g. cyber vandalism, even small attacks can severely impact unprotected Internet properties.

DDoS attack trends for 2022 Q2 (✍️)
We already mentioned how application (72%) and network-layer (109%) attacks have been growing year over year — in the latter, attacks of 100 Gbps and larger increased by 8% QoQ, and attacks lasting more than 3 hours increased by 12% QoQ. Here you can also find interesting trends, like how Broadcast Media companies in Ukraine were the most targeted in Q2 2022 by DDoS attacks. In fact, all the top five most attacked industries are all in online/Internet media, publishing, and broadcasting.

Cloudflare customers on Free plans can now also get real-time DDoS alerts (✍️)
A DDoS is cyber-attack that attempts to disrupt your online business and can be used in any type of Internet property, server, or network (whether it relies on VoIP servers, UDP-based gaming servers, or HTTP servers). That said, our Free plan can now get real-time alerts about HTTP DDoS attacks that were automatically detected and mitigated by us.

One of the benefits of Cloudflare is that all of our services and features can work together to protect your website and also improve its performance. Here’s our specialist, Omer Yoachimik, top 3 tips to leverage a Cloudflare free account (and put your settings more efficient to deal with DDoS attacks):

  1. Put Cloudflare in front of your website:

  2. Leverage Cloudflare’s free security features

    • DDoS Protection: it’s enabled by default, and if needed you can also override the action to Block for rules that have a different default value.
    • Security Level: this feature will automatically issue challenges to requests that originate from IP addresses with low IP reputation. Ensure it’s set to Medium at least.
    • Block bad bots – Cloudflare’s free tier of bot protection can help ward off simple bots (from cloud ASNs) and headless browsers by issuing a computationally expensive challenge.
    • Firewall rules: you can create up to five free custom firewall rules to block or challenge traffic that you never want to receive.
    • Managed Ruleset: in addition to your custom rule, enable Cloudflare’s Free Managed Ruleset to protect against high and wide impacting vulnerabilities
  3. Move your content to the cloud

    • Cache as much of your content as possible on the Cloudflare network. The fewer requests that hit your origin, the better — including unwanted traffic.

2. Application level attacks & WAF

Application security: Cloudflare’s view (✍️)
Did you know that around 8% of all Cloudflare HTTP traffic is mitigated? That is something we explain in this application’s general trends March 2022 blog post. That means that overall, ~2.5 million requests per second are mitigated by our global network and never reach our caches or the origin servers, ensuring our customers’ bandwidth and compute power is only used for clean traffic.

You can also have a sense here of what the top mitigated traffic sources are — Layer 7 DDoS and Custom WAF (Web Application Firewall) rules are at the top — and what are the most common attacks. Other highlights include that at that time 38% of HTTP traffic we see is automated (right the number is actually lower, 31% — current trends can be seen on Radar), and the already mentioned (about Galileo) SQLi is the most common attack vector on API endpoints.

WAF for everyone: protecting the web from high severity vulnerabilities (✍️)
This blog post shares a relevant announcement that goes hand in hand with Cloudflare mission of “help build a better Internet” and that also includes giving some level of protection even without costs (something that also help us be better in preventing and mitigating attacks). So, since March we are providing a Cloudflare WAF Managed Ruleset that is running by default on all FREE zones, free of charge.

On this topic, there has also been a growing client side security number of threats that concerns CIOs and security professionals that we mention when we gave, in December, all paid plans access to Page Shield features (last month we made Page Shield malicious code alerts more actionable. Another example is how we detect Magecart-Style attacks that have impacted large organizations like British Airways and Ticketmaster, resulting in substantial GDPR fines in both cases.

3. Phishing (Area 1)

Why we are acquiring Area 1 (✍️)
Phishing remains the primary way to breach organizations. According to CISA, 90% of cyber attacks begin with it. And, in a recent report, the FBI referred to Business Email Compromise as the $43 Billion problem facing organizations.

It was in late February that it was announced that Cloudflare had agreed to acquire Area 1 Security to help organizations combat advanced email attacks and phishing campaigns. Our blog post explains that “Area 1’s team has built exceptional cloud-native technology to protect businesses from email-based security threats”. So, all that technology and expertise has been integrated since then with our global network to give customers the most complete Zero Trust security platform available.

The mechanics of a sophisticated phishing scam and how we stopped it (✍️)
What’s in a message? Possibly a sophisticated attack targeting employees and systems. On August 8, 2022, Twilio shared that they’d been compromised by a targeted SMS phishing attack. We saw an attack with very similar characteristics also targeting Cloudflare’s employees. Here, we do a rundown on how we were able to thwart the attack that could have breached most organizations, by using our Cloudflare One products, and physical security keys. And how others can do the same. No Cloudflare systems were compromised.

Our Cloudforce One threat intelligence team dissected the attack and assisted in tracking down the attacker.

2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”

Introducing browser isolation for email links to stop modern phishing threats (✍️)
Why do humans still click on malicious links? It seems that it’s easier to do it than most people think (“human error is human”). Here we explain how an organization nowadays can’t truly have a Zero Trust security posture without securing email; an application that end users implicitly trust and threat actors take advantage of that inherent trust.

As part of our journey to integrate Area 1 into our broader Zero Trust suite, Cloudflare Gateway customers can enable Remote Browser Isolation for email links. With that, we now give unmatched level of protection from modern multi-channel email-based attacks. While we’re at it, you can also learn how to replace your email gateway with Cloudflare Area 1.

About account takeovers, we explained back in March 2021 how we prevent account takeovers on our own applications (on the phishing side we were already using, as a customer, at the time, Area 1).

Also from last year, here’s our research in password security (and the problem of password reuse) — it gets technical. There’s a new password related protocol called OPAQUE (we added a new demo about it on January 2022) that could help better store secrets that our research team is excited about.

4. Malware/Ransomware & other risks

How Cloudflare Security does Zero Trust (✍️)
Security is more than ever part of an ecosystem that the more robust, the more efficient in avoiding or mitigating attacks. In this blog post written for our Cloudflare One week, we explain how that ecosystem, in this case inside our Zero Trust services, can give protection from malware, ransomware, phishing, command & control, shadow IT, and other Internet risks over all ports and protocols.

Since 2020, we launched Cloudflare Gateway focused on malware detection and prevention directly from the Cloudflare edge. Recently, we also include our new CASB product (to secure workplace tools, personalize access, secure sensitive data).

2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”

Anatomy of a Targeted Ransomware Attack (✍️)
What a ransomware attack looks like for the victim:

“Imagine your most critical systems suddenly stop operating. And then someone demands a ransom to get your systems working again. Or someone launches a DDoS against you and demands a ransom to make it stop. That’s the world of ransomware and ransom DDoS.”

Ransomware attacks continue to be on the rise and there’s no sign of them slowing down in the near future. That was true more than a year ago, when this blog post was written and is still ongoing, up 105% YoY according to a Senate Committee March 2022 report. And the nature of ransomware attacks is changing. Here, we highlight how Ransom DDoS (RDDoS) attacks work, how Cloudflare onboarded and protected a Fortune 500 customer from a targeted one, and how that Gateway with antivirus we mentioned before helps with just that.

We also show that with ransomware as a service (RaaS) models, it’s even easier for inexperienced threat actors to get their hands on them today (“RaaS is essentially a franchise that allows criminals to rent ransomware from malware authors”). We also include some general recommendations to help you and your organization stay secure. Don’t want to click the link? Here they are:

  • Use 2FA everywhere, especially on your remote access entry points. This is where Cloudflare Access really helps.
  • Maintain multiple redundant backups of critical systems and data, both onsite and offsite
  • Monitor and block malicious domains using Cloudflare Gateway + AV
  • Sandbox web browsing activity using Cloudflare RBI to isolate threats at the browser
2022 attacks! An August reading list to go “Shields Up”

Investigating threats using the Cloudflare Security Center (✍️)
Here, first we announce our new threat investigations portal, Investigate, right in the Cloudflare Security Center, that allows all customers to query directly our intelligence to streamline security workflows and tighten feedback loops.

That’s only possible because we have a global and in-depth view, given that we protect millions of Internet properties from attacks (the free plans help us to have that insight). And the data we glean from these attacks trains our machine learning models and improves the efficacy of our network and application security products.

Steps we’ve taken around Cloudflare’s services in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia (✍️)
There’s an emergence of the known as wiper malware attacks (intended to erase the computer it infects) and in this blog post, among other things, we explain how when a wiper malware was identified in Ukraine (it took offline government agencies and a major bank), we successfully adapted our Zero Trust products to make sure our customers were protected. Those protections include many Ukrainian organizations, under our Project Galileo that is having a busy year, and they were automatically put available to all our customers. More recently, the satellite provider Viasat was affected.

Zaraz use Workers to make third-party tools secure and fast (✍️)
Cloudflare announced it acquired Zaraz in December 2021 to help us enable cloud loading of third-party tools. Seems unrelated to attacks? Think again (this takes us back to the secure ecosystem I already mentioned). Among other things, here you can learn how Zaraz can make your website more secure (and faster) by offloading third-party scripts.

That allows to avoid problems and attacks. Which? From code tampering to lose control over the data sent to third-parties. My colleague Yo’av Moshe elaborates on what this solution prevents: “the third-party script can intentionally or unintentionally (due to being hacked) collect information it shouldn’t collect, like credit card numbers, Personal Identifiers Information (PIIs), etc.”. You should definitely avoid those.

Introducing Cloudforce One: our new threat operations and research team (✍️)
Meet our new threat operations and research team: Cloudforce One. While this team will publish research, that’s not its reason for being. Its primary objective: track and disrupt threat actors. It’s all about being protected against a great flow of threats with minimal to no involvement.

Wrap up

The expression “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” doesn’t seem to apply to the fast pacing Internet industry, where attacks are also in the fast track. If you or your company and services aren’t properly protected, attackers (human or bots) will probably find you sooner than later (maybe they already did).

To end on a popular quote used in books, movies and in life: “You keep knocking on the devil’s door long enough and sooner or later someone’s going to answer you”. Although we have been onboarding many organizations while attacks are happening, that’s not the less hurtful solution — preventing and mitigating effectively and forget the protection is even there.

If you want to try some security features mentioned, the Cloudflare Security Center is a good place to start (free plans included). The same with our Zero Trust ecosystem (or Cloudflare One as our SASE, Secure Access Service Edge) that is available as self-serve, and also includes a free plan (this vendor-agnostic roadmap shows the general advantages of the Zero Trust architecture).

If trends are more your thing, Cloudflare Radar has a near real-time dedicated area about attacks, and you can browse and interact with our DDoS attack trends for 2022 Q2 report.

How the James Webb Telescope’s cosmic pictures impacted the Internet

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-the-james-webb-telescopes-cosmic-pictures-impacted-the-internet/

How the James Webb Telescope's cosmic pictures impacted the Internet
The James Webb Telescope reveals emerging stellar nurseries and individual stars in the Carina Nebula that were previously obscured. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI. Full image here.

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” Carl Sagan

How the James Webb Telescope's cosmic pictures impacted the Internet

In the past few years, space technology and travel have been trending with increased  attention and endeavors (including private ones). In our 2021 Year in Review we showed how NASA and SpaceX flew higher, at least in terms of interest on the Internet.

This week, NASA in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), released the first images from the James Webb Telescope (JWST) which conducts infrared astronomy to “reveal the unseen universe”.

How the James Webb Telescope's cosmic pictures impacted the Internet
Webb’s First Deep Field is the first operational image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, depicting a galaxy cluster with a distance of 5.12 billion light-years from Earth. Revealed to the public on 11 July 2022. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI. Full image here.

So, let’s dig into something we really like here at Cloudflare, checking how real life and human interest has an impact on the Internet. In terms of general Internet traffic in the US, Radar shows us that there was an increase both on July 11 and July 12, compared to the previous week (bear in mind that July 4, the previous Monday, was the Independence Day holiday in the US).

How the James Webb Telescope's cosmic pictures impacted the Internet

Next, we look at DNS request trends to get a sense of traffic to Internet properties (and using from this point on EST time in all the charts). Let’s start with the cornucopia of NASA, ESA and other websites (there are many, some dedicated just to the James Webb Telescope findings).

There are two clear spikes in the next chart. The first was around the time the first galaxy cluster infrared image was announced by Joe Biden, on Monday, July 11, 2022 (at 17:00), with traffic rising 13x higher than in the previous week. There was also a 5x spike at 01:00 EST that evening. The second spike was higher and longer and happened during Tuesday, July 12, 2022, when more images were revealed. Tuesday’s peak was at 10:00, with traffic being 19x higher than in the previous week — traffic was higher than 10x between 09:00 and 13:00.

How the James Webb Telescope's cosmic pictures impacted the Internet

The first image was presented by US president at around 17:00 on July 11. DNS traffic was 1.5x higher to White House-related websites than any time in the preceding month.

How the James Webb Telescope's cosmic pictures impacted the Internet

Conclusion: space, the final frontier

As we saw in 2021, space projects and announcements continue to have a clear impact on the Internet, in this case in our DNS request view of Internet traffic. So far, what the James Webb Telescope images are showing us is a glimpse of a never-before-seen picture of parts of the universe (there’s no lack of excitement in Cloudflare’s internal chat groups).

You can keep an eye on these and other trends using Cloudflare Radar and follow @CloudflareRadar on Twitter — recently we covered extensively Canada’s Internet outage.