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Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/eurovision-2022-internet-trends/

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

There’s only one song contest that is more than six decades old and not only presents many new songs (ABBA, Celine Dion, Julio Iglesias and Domenico Modugno shined there), but also has a global stage that involves 40 countries — performers represent those countries and the public votes. The 66th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, in Turin, Italy, had two semi-finals (May 10 and 12) and a final (May 14), all of them with highlights, including Ukraine’s victory. The Internet was impacted in more than one way, from whole countries to the fan and official broadcasters sites, but also video platforms.

On our Eurovision dedicated page, it was possible to see the level of Internet traffic in the 40 participant countries, and we tweeted some highlights during the final.


First, some technicalities. The baseline for the values we use in the following charts is the average of the preceding week, except for the more granular minute by minute view that uses the traffic average of May 9 and 10 as baseline. To estimate the traffic to the several types of websites from the 40 participating countries, we use DNS name resolution data. In this blog post, we’re using CEST, Central European Summer Time.

It’s not often that an entertainment event has an impact on a country’s Internet. So, was there an impact on Eurovision nights?

Let’s start with aggregate Internet traffic to the 40 participant countries (Australia included). In the first May 10 semi-final, there seems to be a slight decrease in traffic during the contest — it makes sense if we think that most people were probably watching the broadcast on national TV (and not on YouTube, that was also transmitting live the event). Traffic was lower than in the previous period between 21:00 and 23:00 (the event was between 21:00 to 23:14), but it was back to normal at 23:00.

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

For the second semi-final that trend is less clear. But the May 14 final (that lasted from 21:00 CEST to 01:10) told a different story. Traffic was 6% lower than on the previous Saturday after 21:00, mostly around 22:00, and after 23:15 it was actually higher (between 4% and 6%) than before and continued that way until 02:00.

What happened at that 23:15 time in Eurovision? The last of the 25 songs at the contest was Estonia’s “Hope”, by Stefan, and it ended at 23:14 (also in this blog post we will also see how 23:16 was the highest spike in terms of DNS traffic to fan websites during the final). This is the Internet traffic in the participating countries on May 14 chart:

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

There were several countries that showed similar impact in terms of traffic change during at least the final. France, UK, Germany, Iceland, Greece and Switzerland are examples.

Eurovision & the UK

The UK was one of the countries where there seems to be more impact during the time of the grand final — last year, according to the ratings, eight million were watching the BBC transmission with the commentator Graham Norton. Traffic started to drop to lower levels than usual at 20:30 (a few minutes before the final) and was 20% lower at 22:00, starting to go closer to normal levels after 23:00, when the set of 25 finalists’ songs came to an end.

Here’s the UK’s Internet traffic trend during the Eurovision May 14 final:

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

Fan sites: what a difference a winner makes

The most obvious thing to check in terms of impact are the fan websites. Eurovision has many, some general (there’s the OGAE, General Organisation of Eurovision Fans), others more local. And DNS traffic to them was clearly impacted.

The first semi-final, on May 10, had 33x more traffic than in the average of the previous week, with a clear 22:00 CEST spike. But the second semi-final, May 12, topped that, with 42x more traffic at the same time. The final, with the 25 finalists, clearly surpassed that and at 22:00 traffic was already 70x. But because the final was much longer (in the semi-finals it was around 23:00 that the finalists were announced), the peak was reached at 23:00, with 86x more traffic than usual.

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

“We have a winner. The winner of the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 is… Ukraine!”.
— Alessandro Cattelan, Laura Pausini and Mika at 01:01 CEST, May 15, 2022.

Saturday’s final was more than four hours long (the semi-finals took little over two hours), and it finished a few minutes after 01:00 CEST. DNS traffic to fan websites dropped from 86x to 45x at midnight, but it went up again to 49x more traffic when it was already 01:00 CEST in most of Europe and Ukraine was announced the winner of Eurovision 2022. This next chart shows Saturday’s May 14 final traffic change to fan sites:

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

We can also clearly see that on Sunday morning, at 09:00, there was a 20x peak to fan sites, and also at 11:00 (17%).

Now, let’s go deeper by looking at a minute by minute view (the previous charts show hourly data) of DNS traffic to fan sites. In the two semi-finals it’s easy to see that the moment the finalists were announced, and the event was ending, around 23:12, was when traffic was higher. Here’s what the May 10 (yellow) and May 12 (green) two semi-finals fan sites growth looked like:

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

We can also spot some highlights in fan sites during the semi-final besides the finalists’ announcement, which we saw were definitely the most popular moments of the two nights. First, on May 10 there was more traffic before the event (21:00) than on May 12, so people seem to have greater expectations of the first Eurovision 2022 event of the week. In terms of spikes (before the winners’ announcements), we created a list of moments in time with more interest to the fan websites and connected them to the events that were taking place at that time in Eurovision (ordered by impact):

First semi-final, May 10
#1. 22:47 Sum up of all the songs.
#2. 22:25 Norway’s song (Subwoolfer, “Give That Wolf a Banana”).
#3. 21:42 Bulgaria’s song (Intelligent Music Project, “Intention”).
#4. 21:51 Moldova’s song (Zdob și Zdub and Advahov Brothers, “Trenulețul”).
#5. 22:20 Greece’s song (Amanda Georgiadi Tenfjord, “Die Together”).

Second semi-final, May 12
#1. 21:22 Between Serbia (Konstrakta, “In corpore sano”) and Azerbaijan (Nadir Rustamli, “Fade to Black”).
#2. 22:48 Voting period starts.
#3. 22:30 Czech Republic’s song (We Are Domi, “Lights Off”).
#4. 22:38 Laura Pausini & Mika performing (“Fragile” Sting cover song).
#5. 22:21 Belgium’s song (Jérémie Makiese, “Miss You”).

How about the May 14 final? This chart (followed by a ranking list) shows DNS traffic spikes in fan sites on Saturday’s final:

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

Final, May 14
#1. 23:11 Between Serbia (Konstrakta, “In corpore sano”) and Estonia (Stefan, “Hope”).
#2. 23:33 Sum up of all the songs.
#3. 23:57 Voting ended.
#4. 23:19 Sum up of all the songs.
#5. 23:01 Ending of the United Kingdom’s song (Sam Ryder, “Space Man”).


(UK’s performer and representative Sam Ryder with Graham Norton, the BBC commentator of Eurovision since 2009 — the BBC broadcasts the event since 1956.)

The broadcasters show

How about official national broadcaster websites? Around 23:00 CEST traffic to the aggregate of 40 broadcasters was generally higher on the semi-finals and final nights (represented in grey on the next chart). That’s more clear on the final at 23:00, when DNS traffic was 18% higher than in the previous Saturday (and 50% compared to the previous day). During the semi-finals the difference is more subtle, but at 23:00 traffic in both May 10 and 12 traffic was ~6% higher than in previous days.

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

When we focus on the minute by minute view also on the broadcaster sites but on the three Eurovision evenings, the highest growth in traffic is also during the final (like we saw in the fan sites), mainly after 23:00, which seems normal, considering that the final was much longer in time than the semi-finals that ended around that time.

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

During the final (represented in pink in the previous chart), there were some clear spikes. We’ve added them to a ranking that also shows what was happening in the event at that time.

Broadcaster site spikes. Final, May 14
#1. 21:52 Best moments clip of the two semi-finals
#2. 21:00 Contest starts
#3. 00:24 Sam Ryder, the UK representative (with the song “Space Man”) being interviewed after reaching the #1 in the voting process.
#4. 01:09 Ukraine’s (Kalush Orchestra, “Stefania”) performance as the winner
#5. 01:02 Ukraine was announced as the Eurovision 2022 winner.

Video platforms: the post-final growth

Eurovision uses video platforms like YouTube and TikTok to share all the songs, clips of the events and performers and there was also a live transmission on YouTube of the three nights. Given that, we looked at DNS traffic to the video platforms in an aggregate for the 40 participating countries. So, was there an impact to this well known and high performing social and video platforms? The short answer is: yes.

The final was also the most evident example, especially after 23:15, when all the 25 finalists songs already performed and the event had two more hours of non-participant performances, video clips that summarize the songs and the voting process — the famous moment in Europe to find out who will get from each of the 40 participant countries the maximum of 12 points.

In this comparison between the semi-finals and final day, we can see how on May 10, the day of the first semi-final, video platform traffic had more growth before the contest started, which is not that surprising given that it was the first Eurovision 2022 event and there was perhaps curiosity to check who were the other contestants (by then Eurovision had videos of them all on YouTube).

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

But the May 14 final shows more DNS traffic growth than the other Eurovision days after 23:16 (as we saw before, that was the time when all the finalists’ songs had already been performed). The difference in traffic compared to the semi-finals was higher at 1:11 CEST. That was the moment that the final came to an end on Saturday night, and at that time it reached 31% more traffic to video platforms than on May 10, and 38% than on May 12.

Australia’s impact (with an eight hours difference)

Australia was one of the 40 participants, and it had a major time difference (there’s an eight-hour difference to CEST). Continuing to look at video platforms, DNS traffic in Australia was 22% higher at 23:00 CEST (07:00 local time) than it was in the previous Saturday and continued high around 17% of increase a few hours after. Before the 23:00 peak, traffic was 20% higher at 22:00 and 17% at 21:00, when the event was beginning.

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

The winners & social media

Social media in general in the 40 participating countries wasn’t as impacted, but there was a 01:00 CEST spike during the final at around the time the decision to choose the winner was between Ukraine and the UK — at 01:01 Ukraine was announced the winner of Eurovision 2022.

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

We can also see an impact on social media in Ukraine, when Kalush Orchestra’s “Stefania” song was announced the winner at Saturday’s, May 14, final (it was already after midnight, May 15). The usual traffic slowing down night trend that is seen in other days was clearly interrupted after 01:02 CEST (02:02 local time in Ukraine).

Eurovision 2022, the Internet effect version

Conclusion: the Eurovision effect

When an event like Eurovision happens, there are different patterns on the Internet in the participating countries, usually all in Europe (although this year Australia was also there). Fan and broadcaster websites have specific impact because of the event, but in such a multimedia event, there are also some changes in video platforms’ DNS traffic.

And that trend goes as far as the Internet traffic of the participating countries at a more general level, something that seems to indicate that people, at least for some parts of Eurovision and in some countries, were more focused on their national TV broadcast.

The Internet is definitely a human-centric place, as we saw before in different moments like the 2022 Oscars, the Super Bowl, French elections, Ramadan or even the war on Ukraine and the impact on the open Internet in Russia.

How Ramadan shows up in Internet trends

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-ramadan-shows-up-in-internet-trends/

How Ramadan shows up in Internet trends

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 year, Ramadan started on April 2, and it continued until May 1, 2022, (dates vary and are dependent on the appearance of the crescent moon). For Muslims, it is a period of introspection, communal prayer and also of fasting every day from dawn to sunset. That means that people only eat at night (Iftar is the first meal after sunset that breaks the fast and often also a family or community event), and also before sunrise (Suhur).

In some countries, the impact is so big that we can see in our Internet traffic charts when the sun sets. Sunrise is more difficult to check in the charts, but in the countries more impacted, people wake up much earlier than usual and were using the Internet in the early morning because of that.

Cloudflare Radar data shows that Internet traffic was impacted in several countries by Ramadan, with a clear increase in traffic before sunrise, and a bigger than usual decrease after sunset. All times in this blog post are local. The data in the charts is bucketed into hours. So, for example, when we show an increase in traffic at 0400 we are showing that an increase occurred between 0400 and 0459 local time.

Indonesia is a clear example of that, showing trends that continued until the end of Ramadan:

How Ramadan shows up in Internet trends

In the next table, we show a country ranking by order of impact. Here, we include traffic changes before dawn and after sunset. In the last column, you can also see the change in traffic after Ramadan ended, right after sunset. In this case, we’re looking at Wednesday, May 4, right after the Eid al-fitr — the May 2-3, 2022 holiday of breaking the fast, in a comparison with the previous Wednesday at the same time (when Ramadan was ongoing):

Internet traffic: Ramadan’s impact Before sunrise After sunset Post-Ramadan, May 4 (after sunset)
Afghanistan +203% -28% +20%
Pakistan +119% -39% +13%
Indonesia +98% -13% –
Morocco +90% -36% +44%
Libya +81% -27% +48%
Turkey +78% -19% +22%
Bangladesh +62% -40% +12%
Saudi Arabia +55% -45% -5%
United Arab Emirates +52% -13% +4%
Bahrain +44% -31% +21%
Malaysia +41% -8% -9%
Qatar +35% -23% +5%
Egypt +31% -32% +56%
Tunisia +25% -43% +101%
Iran +24% +10% -12%
Singapore +8% -5% +4%
India – -15% –

Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, Libya and Turkey had the biggest impact in an increase in traffic before sunrise. After sunset, it was (by order of impact) Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Bangladesh, Pakistan that showed a more clear decrease in traffic after sunset.

Here’s the impact of the start of Ramadan on Bangladesh, with more highlights inside the next chart:

How Ramadan shows up in Internet trends

Waking up earlier

There’s a clear pattern in most of the countries, Internet traffic was much higher than usual between 04:00 to 04:59 local time (where usually it’s the time with the lowest traffic).

The same early spike is seen in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. In the case of the United Arab Emirates, the time before sunrise for the Suhur meal had more mobile usage than usual (so people were using their mobile devices to access the Internet more than usual at that time).

That’s also the case for Pakistan, where traffic is 119% higher on the 04:00 to 04:59 hour on April 3, than on the previous Sunday, but also in Qatar (sunrise at 05:25 and a spike of 35%) or Afghanistan. In the latter, the spike is 203% higher:

How Ramadan shows up in Internet trends

We also saw the same trend in Indonesia, sunrise was at 05:55 local time at the beginning of April, and there’s a clear spike in traffic in the 04:00 to 04:59 hour with a 98% growth in requests.

Northern African countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco or Libya (sunrise at 06:54), show the same 04:00 to 04:59 hour spike. In Libya, traffic was 81% higher on Sunday, April 3, than it was the previous Sunday at the same time. Usually, the 04:00 to 04:59 hour is the lowest point in traffic in the country, but on April 3 and the following days it was at 08:00.

Saudi Arabia shows a similar pattern in terms of Internet traffic on Sunday, April 3, 2022, sunrise was at 05:44, and there was 55% more Internet use than at the same time on the previous Sunday, before Ramadan.

How Ramadan shows up in Internet trends

Does daily total Internet traffic go up or down?

The short answer is: depends on the country, given that there are examples of a  general increase and decrease in traffic in the most impacted countries. We see similar trends for the sunset and sunrise times of day, but it’s a different story throughout the 30 days of Ramadan.

Iran, in general, shows an increase in traffic after Ramadan started on April 2, and a decrease after it ended on May 3 (of around 15%).

How Ramadan shows up in Internet trends

Something similar is seen in Pakistan, that had a general decrease in traffic the week after Ramadan ended, but during the 18:00 to 18:59 hour, May 4, had 13% more traffic than at the same time on the previous Wednesday, when Ramadan was being observed and the iftar meal would have happened during the 18:00 to 18:59 hour.

How Ramadan shows up in Internet trends

The opposite happens in Libya, where traffic, generally speaking, declined during Ramadan and picked up after — comparing Wednesday, May 4, 2022, with the previous one during the 19:00 to 19:59 hour, traffic grew around 48%. The same trend is seen in another North African country: Morocco (growth of 44% after Ramadan ended).

How Ramadan shows up in Internet trends

After Ramadan, sunsets ‘bring’ more Internet traffic

Another pattern, unsurprisingly, that our chart at the beginning of this blog post shows is how the sunset period changes when Ramadan (and the holiday that follows) ends, in most cases clearly increasing traffic at around 18:00 or 19:00.

Of the 16 countries with a bigger Ramadan impact, only four had a decrease in traffic after sunset on May 4: Iran, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. All of these countries had an increase (or sustained traffic) in daily traffic during Ramadan and lost daily Internet usage after it ended (in May).

Here’s the example of Indonesia through the Ramadan period that includes April and May:

How Ramadan shows up in Internet trends

And a zoomed-in Indonesia chart after Ramadan ended (May 1, but bear in mind that May 2-3 is the holiday Eid al-fitr) that shows not only the general decrease in traffic, but also how the sunset period doesn’t have a clear drop in requests as seen in the Ramadan period:

How Ramadan shows up in Internet trends

Conclusion: a human impact

Ramadan has a clear impact on Internet traffic patterns as humans change their habits.

The Internet may be the network of networks, where there are many bots (friendly and less friendly), but it continues to be a human-powered network, made by humans for humans.

Follow our Internet trends (including details about ASNs) on Cloudflare Radar, and also on Radar’s Twitter account.

Watching Eurovision 2022 on Cloudflare Radar

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/watching-eurovision-2022-on-cloudflare-radar/

Watching Eurovision 2022 on Cloudflare Radar

Watching Eurovision 2022 on Cloudflare Radar

The Eurovision Song Contest has a history that goes back to 1956, so it’s even older than the European Union and one of its highlights over the years was being the first global stage for the Swedish group ABBA — Waterloo won the 1974 edition). This year, for the 66th edition, we have a dedicated page for Eurovision fans, journalists or anyone interested in following Internet trends related to the event taking place in Turin, Italy.

The contest consists of two semi-finals and a final. The first semi-final is today, May 10, at 21:00 CEST, the second is Thursday, May 12, at 21:00 CEST. And the final is on Saturday, May 14, at 21:00 CEST. We are using Central European Summer Time and not our usual (on Radar) UTC because that’s the timezone of most of the 40 countries that will take part in the contest. There will be 17 countries in the first semi-final, 18 in the second, and 25 in the final (the full list is here).

From countries to fan sites.

First, you can see the Internet traffic aggregate in all the 40 countries that are participating in Eurovision 2022. There’s also a toggle to choose each of the 40 countries regarding Internet traffic. If you pass the mouse over the traffic line, the traffic level hour by hour is also highlighted.

Watching Eurovision 2022 on Cloudflare Radar

Then, we use DNS name resolution data to estimate traffic from the 40 participating countries to several types of websites. We have a video platforms chart as Eurovision has content on major video platforms. The baseline for the values we use is the average of the previous week, represented in the charts.

Watching Eurovision 2022 on Cloudflare Radar

We also show social media trends in the participating countries, by hour, to see if the Eurovision semi-finals and final cause a change.

The contest has a large base of fan websites (there’s even the OGAE, General Organisation of Eurovision Fans), and we also have a chart for Eurovision fan sites. In this chart, yesterday at 20:00 CEST, traffic was already at its highest since May 1, with 6.22x more than the average of the previous week (that’s the baseline here).

Watching Eurovision 2022 on Cloudflare Radar

Last, but not least, we also show the impact on national official broadcasters’ websites from the participating countries. For all the charts, there’s a download button to save the image file like this:

Watching Eurovision 2022 on Cloudflare Radar

For this evening’s first semi-final, Portugal is participating and since we’re writing this blog post from our Lisbon office, I asked everyone’s favorite songs for the 2022 Eurovision edition. Norway’s song from Subwoolfer, Give That Wolf A Banana, was one of the favorites, followed by Portugal’s song from MARO, Saudade, Saudade.

The UK’s song from Sam Ryder, SPACE MAN, is automatically in Saturday’s final and was also praised at the Lisbon office, the same with France’s song from Alvan & Ahez, called Fulenn, where the group sings in their native language, Breton (from the French region of Brittany).

Besides our dedicated Eurovision page, radar.cloudflare.com/eurovision-2022, we will also be checking this week for some trends on Cloudflare Radar’s Twitter account. Let the songs (and the Internet trends) begin.

Tracking shifts in Internet connectivity in Kherson, Ukraine

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/tracking-shifts-in-internet-connectivity-in-kherson-ukraine/

Tracking shifts in Internet connectivity in Kherson, Ukraine

The Internet is not only a human right according to the United Nations, and a way to get information, but it has also become an important element in geopolitical conflicts, like the war going on in Ukraine. We have previously written about Ukrainians moving westward to escape the war and Internet outages in the country, but also about the importance of the open Internet in Russia.

Over this past week, we observed an outage in the occupied city of Kherson, south Ukraine, coupled with an apparent shift in who controls the Internet within the region. First, let’s give some context and show what we saw.

The Russian-occupied Kherson (a city of 280,000 people) experienced an Internet outage on Saturday, April 30, 2022, that began just after 16:00 UTC. The outage lasted until Wednesday, May 4, with traffic starting to return around 04:30 UTC traffic.

Tracking shifts in Internet connectivity in Kherson, Ukraine

In the chart below, we can see that there was a 43% decrease in traffic from Kherson from February 23 to 24, after the war started. However, this weekend’s outage is the most significant disruption to Internet traffic in Kherson since the start of the war.

Tracking shifts in Internet connectivity in Kherson, Ukraine

According to Ukraine’s vice Prime-Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, and also the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection, on Wednesday morning, May 4, “the communication cut off by the occupiers in Kherson and Kherson region was restored” using “backup power channels”. The reasons presented for the lack of communication “were interruptions of fiber-optic trunk lines and disconnection from the power supply of equipment of operators in the region”.

Yuriy Shchyhol, head of the organization, also said during a briefing that the occupiers had connected Ukrainian Internet users to the Russian network by switching fiber-optic lines and communication stations. “This is a gross violation of international law. We have already appealed to the International Telecommunication Union to impose sanctions on the Russian Federation”, he explained.

Shift in routing

Around the time that the outage referenced above began, we also observed a shift in routing for the IPv4 prefix announced by AS47598 (Khersontelecom). As shown in the table below, prior to the outage, it reached the Internet through several other Ukrainian network providers, including AS12883, AS3326, and AS35213. However, a day later, its routing path now showed a Russian network, AS201776 (Miranda) as the upstream provider. The path through Miranda also includes AS12389 (Rostelecom), which bills itself as “the largest digital services provider in Russia”. This aligns with the claims noted above about connecting Ukrainian Internet users to the Russian network.

Peer AS Last Update AS Path
AS1299 (TWELVE99 Arelion, fka Telia Carrier) 5/1/2022 16:02:26 1299 12389 201776 47598
AS6777 (AMS-IX-RS) 4/28/2022 11:23:33 12883 47598

Because Cloudflare uses Anycast to route content requests to data centers on our network, routing changes such as this one can impact data center selection. This is clearly evident in the graph below. Prior to the outage, when Khersontelecom reached the Internet through other Ukrainian providers, requests from the network were handled by Cloudflare data centers in Kyiv, Ukraine and Frankfurt, Germany. On May 1, after the Russian network began to route traffic for Khersontelecom, requests were sent to our Moscow data center.

Tracking shifts in Internet connectivity in Kherson, Ukraine

These requests continued to be handled by our Moscow data center for approximately three days. However, the graph also shows that traffic started being handled again by the Kyiv and Frankfurt data centers, with the Moscow data center no longer in the mix, around 06:00 UTC on May 4. This aligns with the observed update to the routing path for AS47598 shown in the table below – it no longer had Russian networks as upstream providers, but instead returned to reaching the Internet through other Ukrainian networks.

Peer AS Last Update AS Path
AS174 (COGENT-174) 5/4/2022 05:56:27 174 3326 3326 3326 47598
AS1273 (CW Vodafone Group PLC) 5/4/2022 03:11:25 1273 12389 201776 47598

Conclusion

As we saw, not only was there an Internet outage in the Kherson region, but there was also a shift in routing at least in one Kherson network that, for a few days, left traffic passing through Russian networks (along with all the restrictions and limitations, such as content blocking, such an arrangement could potentially have).

Availability of and control over physical resources have always been a key focus of war, but it is now clear that Internet resources now hold similar importance during times of conflict. This is also demonstrated by what happened to the Internet in Crimea after the annexation of 2014, as explained in-depth in this 2020 study.

You can follow Internet trends (including details about ASNs) on Cloudflare Radar, and also on Radar’s Twitter account.

US Tax Day 2022. How leaving it to the last day impacts tax sites

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/us-tax-day-2022-how-leaving-it-to-the-last-day-impacts-tax-sites/

US Tax Day 2022. How leaving it to the last day impacts tax sites

“Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
— Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, 1789

US Tax Day 2022. How leaving it to the last day impacts tax sites

The famous expression highlighting that only “death and taxes” seem certain in life (something that goes back to the beginning of civilization and to Ancient Egypt) is on people’s minds during the month of April in the United States. This past Monday, April 18, 2022, was Tax Day. So, were US citizens procrastinators, leaving their federal (and state) tax returns to the last day? Traffic to tax-related official federal and state websites seems to show it: there was a spike of more than 470% on April 18.

Just for reference, we can see on Cloudflare Radar that Internet traffic in the US, from our perspective, wasn’t significantly impacted on Monday, April 18, although there was a clear peak, higher than in the previous 14 days, that night at 22:00 EST (that’s 02:00 UTC on April 19). So, traffic (that includes DNS and HTTP requests from our standpoint) was 18% higher compared to the same time on the previous Monday.

US Tax Day 2022. How leaving it to the last day impacts tax sites

For the following charts, Cloudflare Radar uses a variety of sources to provide aggregate information about Internet traffic and attack trends. In this blog post, we will use DNS name resolution data as a proxy for traffic to Internet services, as we did for Super Bowl LVI or for the Oscars 2022.

In this case, the baseline value for the charts (that we use to get the percent growth) was calculated by taking the mean DNS traffic level for the associated Internet services on March 31 — a typical day before from the April 18 deadline. On these charts, we are using the EST timezone.

Let’s start with an aggregate of all the federal and state level official tax-related sites. This Monday, DNS requests jumped at 13:00 EST to 472% more than usual (the average on March 31 for all the 51 sites we’re checking is the baseline here). That’s 203% more than the previous highest growth day in April.

US Tax Day 2022. How leaving it to the last day impacts tax sites

Here are the top five days in April ranked by traffic increase:

US federal and state official tax sites peaks in requests

  1. Monday, April 18 (Tax Day 2022), 13:00 — 472% growth.
  2. Thursday, April 14, 15:00 — 269%.
  3. Friday, April 15, 15:00 — 264%.
  4. Monday, April 11, 13:00 — 252%.
  5. Wednesday, April 13, 14:00 — 251%.

Taxes on weekdays

Another trend in the previous chart is that people seem to use more weekdays in April than the weekends to submit their taxes (or to visit official tax-related sites). That’s a trend we see not only for federal sites, but also for the state ones (even more in the latter).

State official tax sites also have a bigger growth in requests in April, from our perspective, than federal, but the general growth is very clear right from the beginning of April, with a relevant peak going up to 221% of increase in traffic at 13:00 EST on April 4.

Another more specific trend regarding Tax Day 2022 was that traffic was higher than before any other day in April right around 09:00 (with 293% increase) and it continued that way until 20:00.

US Tax Day 2022. How leaving it to the last day impacts tax sites

Tax services with a growth up to 680%

In the taxes filling realm there are also many services, some smaller and local, others national and well known, that help people to do the inevitable business of dealing with sales, income, property, license or other taxes.

The peak was reached on Monday, April 18, at 19:00 EST with a growth in requests of 680%. It was a busy afternoon and evening across the US for tax services.

US Tax Day 2022. How leaving it to the last day impacts tax sites

And here’s the top five ranking of traffic growth for tax services sites in April:

US tax services sites peaks in requests

  1. Monday, April 18 (Tax Day 2022), 19:00 — 680% growth
  2. Sunday, April 17, 20:00 — 439%
  3. Friday, April 15, 12:00 — 328%
  4. Saturday, April 16, 14:00 — 326%
  5. Sunday, April 10, 15:00 — 311%

For these types of sites, there are more spikes of traffic on the weekends than on weekdays and that started right at the beginning of April, with Sunday, April 3, reaching 295% in growth, not that far from the peaks on the days prior to Tax Day 2022.

We can also see in a more detailed view in the next chart that at 10:00 on Tax Day 2022 requests growth were already at an all month high with more than 478% of increase. The sustained growth was maintained throughout the day and only after 22:00 (474%) did it drop lower than in previous days.

US Tax Day 2022. How leaving it to the last day impacts tax sites

Conclusion

No surprise, people are aware of the deadlines for their tax returns, and many do leave it to the last day and that is very clear looking at the trends related to tax sites.

If you’re curious about these types of trends, check Cloudflare Radar for up-to-date insights about all the countries on Earth.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Post Syndicated from Omer Yoachimik original https://blog.cloudflare.com/ddos-attack-trends-for-2022-q1/

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Welcome to our first DDoS report of 2022, and the ninth in total so far. This report includes new data points and insights both in the application-layer and network-layer sections — as observed across the global Cloudflare network between January and March 2022.

The first quarter of 2022 saw a massive spike in application-layer DDoS attacks, but a decrease in the total number of network-layer DDoS attacks. Despite the decrease, we’ve seen volumetric DDoS attacks surge by up to 645% QoQ, and we mitigated a new zero-day reflection attack with an amplification factor of 220 billion percent.

In the Russian and Ukrainian cyberspace, the most targeted industries were Online Media and Broadcast Media. In our Azerbaijan and Palestinian Cloudflare data centers, we’ve seen enormous spikes in DDoS activity — indicating the presence of botnets operating from within.

The Highlights

The Russian and Ukrainian cyberspace

  • Russian Online Media companies were the most targeted industries within Russia in Q1. The next most targeted was the Internet industry, then Cryptocurrency, and then Retail. While many attacks that targeted Russian Cryptocurrency companies originated in Ukraine or the US, another major source of attacks was from within Russia itself.
  • The majority of HTTP DDoS attacks that targeted Russian companies originated from Germany, the US, Singapore, Finland, India, the Netherlands, and Ukraine. It’s important to note that being able to identify where cyber attack traffic originates is not the same as being able to attribute where the attacker is located.
  • Attacks on Ukraine targeted Broadcast Media and Publishing websites and seem to have been more distributed, originating from more countries — which may indicate the use of global botnets. Still, most of the attack traffic originated from the US, Russia, Germany, China, the UK, and Thailand.

Read more about what Cloudflare is doing to keep the Open Internet flowing into Russia and keep attacks from getting out.

Ransom DDoS attacks

  • In January 2022, over 17% of under-attack respondents reported being targeted by ransom DDoS attacks or receiving a threat in advance.
  • That figure drastically dropped to 6% in February, and then to 3% in March.
  • When compared to previous quarters, we can see that in total, in Q1, only 10% of respondents reported a ransom DDoS attack; a 28% decrease YoY and 52% decrease QoQ.

Application-layer DDoS attacks

  • 2022 Q1 was the busiest quarter in the past 12 months for application-layer attacks. HTTP-layer DDoS attacks increased by 164% YoY and 135% QoQ.
  • Diving deeper into the quarter, in March 2022 there were more HTTP DDoS attacks than in all of Q4 combined (and Q3, and Q1).
  • After four consecutive quarters in a row with China as the top source of HTTP DDoS attacks, the US stepped into the lead this quarter. HTTP DDoS attacks originating from the US increased by a staggering 6,777% QoQ and 2,225% YoY.

Network-layer DDoS attacks

  • Network-layer attacks in Q1 increased by 71% YoY but decreased 58% QoQ.
  • The Telecommunications industry was the most targeted by network-layer DDoS attacks, followed by Gaming and Gambling companies, and the Information Technology and Services industry.
  • Volumetric attacks increased in Q1. Attacks above 10 Mpps (million packets per second) grew by over 300% QoQ, and attacks over 100 Gbps grew by 645% QoQ.

This report is based on DDoS attacks that were automatically detected and mitigated by Cloudflare’s DDoS Protection systems. To learn more about how it works, check out this deep-dive blog post.

A note on how we measure DDoS attacks observed over our network
To analyze attack trends, we calculate the “DDoS activity” rate, which is either the percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic (attack + clean) observed over our global network, or in a specific location, or in a specific category (e.g., industry or billing country). Measuring the percentages allows us to normalize data points and avoid biases reflected in absolute numbers towards, for example, a Cloudflare data center that receives more total traffic and likely, also more attacks.

To view an interactive version of this report view it on Cloudflare Radar.

Ransom Attacks

Our systems constantly analyze traffic and automatically apply mitigation when DDoS attacks are detected. Each DDoS’d customer is prompted with an automated survey to help us better understand the nature of the attack and the success of the mitigation.

For over two years now, Cloudflare has been surveying attacked customers — one question on the survey being if they received a threat or a ransom note demanding payment in exchange to stop the DDoS attack. In the last quarter, 2021 Q4, we observed a record-breaking level of reported ransom DDoS attacks (one out of every five customers). This quarter, we’ve witnessed a drop in ransom DDoS attacks with only one out of 10 respondents reporting a ransom DDoS attack; a 28% decrease YoY and 52% decrease QoQ.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

When we break it down by month, we can see that January 2022 saw the largest number of respondents reporting receiving a ransom letter in Q1. Almost one out of every five customers (17%).

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Application-layer DDoS attacks

Application-layer DDoS attacks, specifically HTTP DDoS attacks, are attacks that usually aim to disrupt a web server by making it unable to process legitimate user requests. If a server is bombarded with more requests than it can process, the server will drop legitimate requests and — in some cases — crash, resulting in degraded performance or an outage for legitimate users.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Application-layer DDoS attacks by month

In Q1, application-layer DDoS attacks soared by 164% YoY and 135% QoQ – the busiest quarter within the past year.

Application-layer DDoS attacks increased to new heights in the first quarter of 2022. In March alone, there were more HTTP DDoS attacks than in all of 2021 Q4 combined (and Q3, and Q1).

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Application-layer DDoS attacks by industry

Consumer Electronics was the most targeted industry in Q1.

Globally, the Consumer Electronics industry was the most attacked with an increase of 5,086% QoQ. Second was the Online Media industry with a 2,131% increase in attacks QoQ. Third were Computer Software companies, with an increase of 76% QoQ and 1,472 YoY.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

However, if we focus only on Ukraine and Russia, we can see that Broadcast Media, Online Media companies, and Internet companies were the most targeted. Read more about what Cloudflare is doing to keep the Open Internet flowing into Russia and keep attacks from getting out.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Application-layer DDoS attacks by source country

To understand the origin of the HTTP attacks, we look at the geolocation of the source IP address belonging to the client that generated the attack HTTP requests. Unlike network-layer attacks, source IP addresses cannot be spoofed in HTTP attacks. A high percentage of DDoS activity in a given country usually indicates the presence of botnets operating from within the country’s borders.

After four consecutive quarters in a row with China as the top source of HTTP DDoS attacks, the US stepped into the lead this quarter. HTTP DDoS attacks originating from the US increased by a staggering 6,777% QoQ and 2,225% YoY. Following China in second place are India, Germany, Brazil, and Ukraine.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Application-layer DDoS attacks by target country

In order to identify which countries are targeted by the most HTTP DDoS attacks, we bucket the DDoS attacks by our customers’ billing countries and represent it as a percentage out of all DDoS attacks.

The US drops to second place, after being first for three consecutive quarters. Organizations in China were targeted the most by HTTP DDoS attacks, followed by the US, Russia, and Cyprus.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Network-layer DDoS attacks

While application-layer attacks target the application (Layer 7 of the OSI model) running the service that end users are trying to access (HTTP/S in our case), network-layer attacks aim to overwhelm network infrastructure (such as in-line routers and servers) and the Internet link itself.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Network-layer DDoS attacks by month

While HTTP DDoS attacks soared in Q1, network-layer DDoS attacks actually decreased by 58% QoQ, but still increased by 71% YoY.

Diving deeper into Q1, we can see that the amount of network-layer DDoS attacks remained mostly consistent throughout the quarter with about a third of attacks occurring every month.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Cloudflare mitigates zero-day amplification DDoS attack

Amongst these network-layer DDoS attacks are also zero-day DDoS attacks that Cloudflare automatically detected and mitigated.

In the beginning of March, Cloudflare researchers helped investigate and expose a zero-day vulnerability in Mitel business phone systems that amongst other possible exploitations, also enables attackers to launch an amplification DDoS attack. This type of attack reflects traffic off vulnerable Mitel servers to victims, amplifying the amount of traffic sent in the process by an amplification factor of 220 billion percent in this specific case. You can read more about it in our recent blog post.

We observed several of these attacks across our network. One of them targeted a North American cloud provider using the Cloudflare Magic Transit service. The attack originated from 100 source IPs mainly from the US, UK, Canada, Netherlands, Australia, and approximately 20 other countries. It peaked above 50 Mpps (~22 Gbps) and was automatically detected and mitigated by Cloudflare systems.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Network-layer DDoS attacks by industry

Many network-layer DDoS attacks target Cloudflare’s IP ranges directly. These IP ranges serve our WAF/CDN customers, Cloudflare authoritative DNS, Cloudflare public DNS resolver 1.1.1.1,  Cloudflare Zero Trust products, and our corporate offices, to name a few. Additionally, we also allocate dedicated IP addresses to customers via our Spectrum product and advertise the IP prefixes of other companies via our Magic Transit, Magic WAN, and Magic Firewall Products for L3/4 DDoS protection.

In this report, for the first time, we’ve begun classifying network-layer DDoS attacks according to the industries of our customers using the Spectrum and Magic products. This classification allows us to understand which industries are targeted the most by network-layer DDoS attacks.

When we look at Q1 statistics, we can see that in terms of attack packets and attack bytes launched towards Cloudflare customers, the Telecommunications industry was targeted the most.  More than 8% of all attack bytes and 10% of all attack packets that Cloudflare mitigated targeted Telecommunications companies.

Following not too far behind, in second and third place were the Gaming / Gambling and Information Technology and Services industries.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Network-layer DDoS attacks by target country

Similarly to the classification by our customers’ industry, we can also bucket attacks by our customers’ billing country as we do for application-layer DDoS attacks, to identify the top attacked countries.

Looking at Q1 numbers, we can see that the US was targeted by the highest percentage of DDoS attacks traffic — over 10% of all attack packets and almost 8% of all attack bytes. Following the US is China, Canada, and Singapore.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Network-layer DDoS attacks by ingress country

When trying to understand where network-layer DDoS attacks originate, we cannot use the same method as we use for the application-layer attack analysis. To launch an application-layer DDoS attack, successful handshakes must occur between the client and the server in order to establish an HTTP/S connection. For a successful handshake to occur, the attacker cannot spoof their source IP address. While the attacker may use botnets, proxies, and other methods to obfuscate their identity, the attacking client’s source IP location does sufficiently represent the attack source of application-layer DDoS attacks.

On the other hand, to launch network-layer DDoS attacks, in most cases, no handshake is needed. Attackers can spoof the source IP address in order to obfuscate the attack source and introduce randomness into the attack properties, which can make it harder for simple DDoS protection systems to block the attack. So if we were to derive the source country based on a spoofed source IP, we would get a ‘spoofed country’.

For this reason, when analyzing network-layer DDoS attack sources, we bucket the traffic by the Cloudflare edge data center locations where the traffic was ingested, and not by the (potentially) spoofed source IP to get an understanding of where the attacks originate from. We are able to achieve geographical accuracy in our report because we have data centers in over 270 cities around the world. However, even this method is not 100% accurate, as traffic may be back hauled and routed via various Internet Service Providers and countries for reasons that vary from cost reduction to congestion and failure management.

In Q1, the percentage of attacks detected in Cloudflare’s data centers in Azerbaijan increased by 16,624% QoQ and 96,900% YoY, making it the country with the highest percentage of network-layer DDoS activity (48.5%).

Following our Azerbaijanian data center is our Palestinian data center where a staggering 41.9% of all traffic was DDoS traffic. This represents a 10,120% increase QoQ and 46,456% YoY.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

To view all regions and countries, check out the interactive map.

Attack vectors

SYN Floods remain the most popular DDoS attack vector, while use of generic UDP floods drops significantly in Q1.

An attack vector is a term used to describe the method that the attacker uses to launch their DDoS attack, i.e., the IP protocol, packet attributes such as TCP flags, flooding method, and other criteria.

In Q1, SYN floods accounted for 57% of all network-layer DDoS attacks, representing a 69% increase QoQ and a 13% increase YoY. In second place, attacks over SSDP surged by over 1,100% QoQ. Following were RST floods and attacks over UDP. Last quarter, generic UDP floods took the second place, but this time, generic UDP DDoS attacks plummeted by 87% QoQ from 32% to a mere 3.9%.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Emerging threats

Identifying the top attack vectors helps organizations understand the threat landscape. In turn, this may help them improve their security posture to protect against those threats. Similarly, learning about new emerging threats that may not yet account for a significant portion of attacks, can help mitigate them before they become a significant force.

When we look at new emerging attack vectors in Q1, we can see increases in DDoS attacks reflecting off of Lantronix services (+971% QoQ) and SSDP reflection attacks (+724% QoQ). Additionally, SYN-ACK attacks increased by 437% and attacks by Mirai botnets by 321% QoQ.

Attacker reflecting traffic off of Lantronix Discovery Service

Lantronix is a US-based software and hardware company that provides solutions for Internet of Things (IoT) management amongst their vast offering. One of the tools that they provide to manage their IoT components is the Lantronix Discovery Protocol. It is a command-line tool that helps to search and find Lantronix devices. The discovery tool is UDP-based, meaning that no handshake is required. The source IP can be spoofed. So an attacker can use the tool to search for publicly exposed Lantronix devices using a 4 byte request, which will then in turn respond with a 30 byte response from port 30718. By spoofing the source IP of the victim, all Lantronix devices will target their responses to the victim — resulting in a reflection/amplification attack.

Simple Service Discovery Protocol used for reflection DDoS attacks

The Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) protocol works similarly to the Lantronix Discovery protocol, but for Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) devices such as network-connected printers. By abusing the SSDP protocol, attackers can generate a reflection-based DDoS attack overwhelming the target’s infrastructure and taking their Internet properties offline. You can read more about SSDP-based DDoS attacks here.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Network-layer DDoS attacks by attack rate

In Q1, we observed a massive uptick in volumetric DDoS attacks — both from the packet rate and bitrate perspective. Attacks over 10 Mpps grew by over 300% QoQ, and attacks over 100 Gbps grew by 645% QoQ.

There are different ways of measuring the size of an L3/4 DDoS attack. One is the volume of traffic it delivers, measured as the bit rate (specifically, terabits per second or gigabits per second). Another is the number of packets it delivers, measured as the packet rate (specifically, millions of packets per second).

Attacks with high bit rates attempt to cause a denial-of-service event by clogging the Internet link, while attacks with high packet rates attempt to overwhelm the servers, routers, or other in-line hardware appliances. These devices dedicate a certain amount of memory and computation power to process each packet. Therefore, by bombarding it with many packets, the appliance can be left with no further processing resources. In such a case, packets are “dropped,” i.e., the appliance is unable to process them. For users, this results in service disruptions and denial of service.

Distribution by packet rate

The majority of network-layer DDoS attacks remain below 50,000 packets per second. While 50 kpps is on the lower side of the spectrum at Cloudflare scale, it can still easily take down unprotected Internet properties and congest even a standard Gigabit Ethernet connection.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

When we look at the changes in the attack sizes, we can see that attacks of over 10 Mpps grew by over 300% QoQ. Similarly, attacks of 1-10 Mpps grew by almost 40% QoQ.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Distribution by bitrate

In Q1, most of the network-layer DDoS attacks remain below 500 Mbps. This too is a tiny drop in the water at Cloudflare scale, but can very quickly shut down unprotected Internet properties with less capacity or at the very least congest, even a standard Gigabit Ethernet connection.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1
Graph of the distribution of network-layer DDoS attacks by bit rate in 2022 Q1

Similarly to the trends observed in the packet-per-second realm, here we can also see large increases. The amount of DDoS attacks that peaked over 100 Gbps increased by 645% QoQ; attacks peaking between 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps increased by 407%; attacks peaking between 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps increased by 88%; and even attacks peaking between 500 Mbps to 1 Gbps increased by almost 20% QoQ.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Network-layer DDoS attacks by duration

Most attacks remain under one hour in duration, reiterating the need for automated always-on DDoS mitigation solutions.

We measure the duration of an attack by recording the difference between when it is first detected by our systems as an attack and the last packet we see with that attack signature towards that specific target.

In previous reports, we provided a breakdown of ‘attacks under an hour’, and larger time ranges. However, in most cases over 90 percent of attacks last less than an hour. So starting from this report, we broke down the short attacks and grouped them by shorter time ranges to provide better granularity.

One important thing to keep in mind is that even if an attack lasts only a few minutes, if it is successful, the repercussions could last well beyond the initial attack duration. IT personnel responding to a successful attack may spend hours and even days restoring their services.

In the first quarter of 2022, more than half of the attacks lasted 10-20 minutes, approximately 40% ended within 10 minutes, another ~5% lasted 20-40 minutes, and the remaining lasted longer than 40 minutes.

DDoS Attack Trends for 2022 Q1

Short attacks can easily go undetected, especially burst attacks that, within seconds, bombard a target with a significant number of packets, bytes, or requests. In this case, DDoS protection services that rely on manual mitigation by security analysis have no chance in mitigating the attack in time. They can only learn from it in their post-attack analysis, then deploy a new rule that filters the attack fingerprint and hope to catch it next time. Similarly, using an “on-demand” service, where the security team will redirect traffic to a DDoS provider during the attack, is also inefficient because the attack will already be over before the traffic routes to the on-demand DDoS provider.

It’s recommended that companies use automated, always-on DDoS protection services that analyze traffic and apply real-time fingerprinting fast enough to block short-lived attacks.

Summary

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. A better Internet is one that is more secure, faster, and reliable for everyone — even in the face of DDoS attacks. As part of our mission, since 2017, we’ve been providing unmetered and unlimited DDoS protection for free to all of our customers. Over the years, it has become increasingly easier for attackers to launch DDoS attacks. But as easy as it has become, we want to make sure that it is even easier — and free — for organizations of all sizes to protect themselves against DDoS attacks of all types.

Not using Cloudflare yet? Start now with our Free and Pro plans to protect your websites, or contact us for comprehensive DDoS protection for your entire network using Magic Transit.

The 2022 French Presidential election leaves its mark on the Internet

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/elections-france-2022/

The 2022 French Presidential election leaves its mark on the Internet

The 2022 French Presidential election leaves its mark on the Internet

The first round of the 2022 French presidential elections were held this past Sunday, April 10, 2022, and a run-off will be held on April 24 between the top two candidates, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Looking at Internet trends in France for Sunday, it appears that when people were voting Internet traffic went down, and, no surprise, it went back up when results are coming in — that includes major spikes to news and election-related websites.

Cloudflare Radar data shows that Sundays are usually high-traffic days in France. But this Sunday looked a little different.

The seven-day Radar chart shows that there was a decrease in traffic compared to the previous Sunday between 08:00 and 16:00 UTC, that’s 10:00 and 18:00 in local time — bear in mind that polling stations in France were open between 08:00 and 19:00 (or 20:00 in big cities) local time. So, the decrease in traffic was ‘inside’ the period when French citizens were allowed to vote.

The 2022 French Presidential election leaves its mark on the Internet

That’s a similar trend we have seen in other elections, like the Portuguese one back in January 2022.

The time of the French election day with the largest difference compared to the previous Sunday was 14:00 UTC (16:00 in local time), when traffic decreased as much as 16% (as the previous 7-day chart shows). That’s clear in this chart:

The 2022 French Presidential election leaves its mark on the Internet

That doesn’t show us precisely how people use the Internet differently on an election day — note that we already saw in the past how the weather, times of the year or even events affect human behaviour and subsequently Internet trends.

Let’s look deeper into those trends. We know that weekdays, weekends and even Sundays have, in many countries, specific patterns so, when we compare the previous four Sundays in France since March 20, we can see some trends highlighted in the next chart:

  • April 10, Election Day, was the Sunday with the most traffic of the previous month at 06:30 UTC (08:30 local time) and in several periods between 16:30 and 20:45 UTC (18:30 and 22:45 local time).
  • April 10, Election Day, was the Sunday with the least traffic of the previous month in several periods between 09:45 and 11:15 (11:45 and 13:15 local time) and it was the #3 out of #4 with less traffic between 12:15 and 16:15 (14:15 and 18:15 local time).
The 2022 French Presidential election leaves its mark on the Internet

This seems to show patterns such as: before going to vote more people than usual were online on Sunday, Election Day (08:30 local time), but traffic went down considerably in the late morning period between (11:30-13:15) and again after lunch (14:15 and 18:15) shortly before the polling stations were closed.

The first exit polls started to be published around 18:40 local time (seen in the second and biggest green circle in the previous chart), but the main exit poll was at 20:00 local time, when all the polling stations were already closed, at that time Internet traffic in France was at its highest compared to Sundays during the past 30 days (seen in the third green circle in the previous chart, 18:00 UTC).

How about mobile devices’ usage trends? People in France were definitely using their mobile devices more on Election Day, and that is also evident when compared to the previous Sunday, April 3.

On Election Day, April 10, 2022, at around 09:00 local time mobile usage represented 60% of Internet traffic and had another spike at 21:00 local time with 58% (the seven-day average for mobile usage in France is 48%).

The 2022 French Presidential election leaves its mark on the Internet

When results arrive, people go online

Official websites usually aren’t the most popular sites in a given country, their popularity is mostly connected to when citizens have to fill in their tax forms online or want to see something like election results — although news media outlets are also important there. Here we’re looking at DNS request trends to get a sense of traffic to Internet properties.


Official French election-related websites like elections.interieur.gouv.fr (where the results are published) had an increase in traffic throughout the week mainly after Monday, April 4, but on election day there were two major spikes.

The 2022 French Presidential election leaves its mark on the Internet

The first spike in traffic was around 20:00 local time (370% more than the previous Sunday at the same time), when all the polling stations were already closed and the first major polls were revealed. But the main spike was later, at midnight (local time), when 84% of the votes were already counted and published — Macron was leading (27%) followed closely by Le Pen (25%). That spike represented 925% more requests than in the previous Sunday.

The news Internet traffic spike ‘knocks’ at 20:00

When there are elections in a country, people tend to see the analysis and results using media outlets from radio to TV, but also the Internet — media websites and social media. Let’s focus on French media outlets. The biggest spike of the week in our aggregate DNS chart, that shows trends from 12 news websites, was definitely on Election Day, around 20:00 local time, when those domains had 116% more traffic than at the same time on the previous Sunday.

The 2022 French Presidential election leaves its mark on the Internet

Nonetheless, after 16:00 local time, traffic started to increase to those news outlets and by 18:00 local time it had its largest spike of the week with sustained growth until 20:00. At 23:00 local time there was another increase in traffic and after that it started to decrease. But, this Monday morning, traffic at 08:00 was already higher again than during the previous week (Election Day excluded). So, no surprise, Sunday night was when people were looking more into the news.

The same trend is seen on the major French TV station websites, with an even more isolated spike at 20:00 local time and a 472% increase in traffic compared to the previous Sunday, when the main exit polls were announced.

The 2022 French Presidential election leaves its mark on the Internet

This was also similar to the broadcast radio website trends. Besides the 20:00 local time spike (272% increase compared to the previous Sunday), there was also a big one at 23:00 local time (300%) and a Monday morning spike with higher than before traffic (82% increase):

The 2022 French Presidential election leaves its mark on the Internet

How about social media?

Regarding social media in France (looking at the aggregate DNS of the several sites), there’s no clear trend regarding the elections, but there were slightly fewer requests than on the previous Sunday. So social media doesn’t appear to have been as impacted by the elections as news websites.

The 2022 French Presidential election leaves its mark on the Internet

Conclusion

Although there aren’t big changes in Internet traffic, like those seen in countries that shut down the Internet during election periods, Election Day seems to influence human and Internet patterns, in this case when results started to pour in on election night people went to news or official election websites.

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

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

Post Syndicated from David Belson original https://blog.cloudflare.com/q1-2022-internet-disruption-summary/

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

Cloudflare operates in more than 250 cities in over 100 countries, where we interconnect with over 10,000 network providers in order to provide a broad range of services to millions of customers. The breadth of both our network and our customer base provides us with a unique perspective on Internet resilience, enabling us to observe the impact of Internet disruptions. In many cases, these disruptions can be attributed to a physical event, while in other cases, they are due to an intentional government-directed shutdown. In this post, we review selected Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the first quarter of 2022, supported by traffic graphs from Cloudflare Radar and other internal Cloudflare tools, and grouped by associated cause.

Plate tectonics

Internet outages caused by “earth movers” are more frequently caused by errant backhoes. However, two Internet disruptions in the first quarter were caused by more significant earth movement — a volcanic eruption and an earthquake.

The first impacted connectivity on the island nation of Tonga, when the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai volcanic eruption damaged the submarine cable connecting Tonga to Fiji, resulting in a 38 day Internet outage. After the January 14 eruption, only minimal Internet traffic (via satellite services) was seen from Tonga. On February 22, Digicel announced that the main island was back online after initial submarine cable repairs were completed – the immediate return of traffic is clearly visible in the figure below. However, it was estimated that repairs to the domestic cable, connecting outlying islands, could take an additional six to nine months.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

The second disruption, caused by a 7.3 magnitude earthquake off the coast of central Japan on March 16, was significantly shorter, and had a significantly smaller impact. The earthquake occurred around 1436 UTC, causing power outages that resulted in a loss of Internet connectivity in cities including Tokyo for several hours, as seen in the figure below. Almost exactly 11 years prior, a magnitude 8.9 earthquake also had a nominal impact on Internet connectivity in Japan, that time apparently due to damage to subsea cable systems.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

Infrastructure damage

Internet resilience is, of course, heavily dependent on the resilience of the underlying physical infrastructure, including data centers, terrestrial fiber, and submarine cables. Damage to this infrastructure often disrupts Internet connectivity.

Early in the morning of January 5, the Gambia was completely isolated from the global Internet. As evident in the figure below, the incident lasted over eight hours, between 0117 and 0945 UTC. According to a press release from GAMTEL, after the failure of the primary link (damage to the ACE submarine cable), traffic was routed onto two backup links through Senegal. However, these backup links also failed because they converged in a location that was ultimately identified as a single point of failure.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

Around 2130 UTC on January 20, Internet traffic to Yemen dropped to near zero, as shown in the figure below, after ongoing airstrikes reportedly hit a telecommunications building in Al-Hudaydah where the FALCON undersea cable lands. The outage lasted four days, finally recovering around 2100 on January 24. The outage primarily affected YemenNet (Public Telecommunication Corporation), the state-owned telecommunications provider.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

On March 1, Tasmania suffered a 6.5-hour Internet outage after two of the three submarine cables (Basslink, Bass Strait-1, Bass Strait-2) connecting it to the Australian mainland were cut.

According to a published report, one of the cuts was on the Victorian (mainland) end, and the other on the Tasmanian side, with both cuts caused by “third parties”.  A significant reduction in traffic between 0130 – 0800 UTC is visible in the figure below.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

A reported Telecom Infrastructure Company (TIC) data center fire caused a four-hour Internet disruption in Iran on March 4. Telecom Infrastructure Company (TIC) is the monopoly provider of telecom infrastructure to all public and private operators in Iran. As the figure below shows, Internet traffic to the country dropped by approximately 20% at 0640 UTC, and recovered around 1030 UTC.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

On March 15, ETECSA, the Cuban state telecommunications company, reported that a fiber optic cable had been cut on a public road in the capital that morning. The impact of this fiber cut on Internet traffic to Cuba and ETECSA is visible in the figures below, starting just after 1200 UTC, lasting for over six hours.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022
Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

Although initially believed to be the result of a power outage (all too common in Venezuela), a March 24 Internet disruption in the country was ultimately due to a fiber cut. Internet traffic to CANTV customers in multiple Venezuelan states dropped significantly between 1140 and 1740 UTC, as seen in the figure below. In addition to this disruption, VE sin Filtro reported a number of additional multi-hour, multi-state Internet disruptions in Venezuela during the first quarter.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

On March 31, Internet traffic to Telenor Pakistan dropped 60% between 0600-0745 UTC, as shown in the figure below. According to Telenor Pakistan responses to hundreds of customer complaints lodged via Twitter, the disruption was due to multiple fiber-optic cable cuts in several locations. Just after 1800 UTC, Telenor Pakistan Tweeted that services had been fully restored.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

Power outages

In addition to the physical infrastructure, reliable electrical power is also critical for resilient Internet connectivity. At a provider level, loss of power can take key data centers and routers offline, impacting connectivity for customers and other connected networks. Consumer power outages can take home/business routers and connected devices offline, forcing users onto mobile connectivity, assuming that is/remains available.

The interconnected electrical grids of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan all suffered outages on January 24 after Kazakhstan’s North-South power line was disconnected due to “emergency imbalances”. These power outages caused multi-hour Internet disruptions across all three countries starting around 0600 UTC, as the figures below show. The impact to traffic in Kazakhstan appeared to be fairly minor, while traffic declined significantly in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and took longer to recover.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022
Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022
Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

A power outage across multiple counties and cities in Taiwan starting around 0100 UTC on March 3 caused a brief #Internet disruption. The figure below shows a nominal initial drop in traffic, though traffic remained lower throughout the next several hours. The power outage was reportedly caused by human negligence during annual repairs of a generator at the Hsinta power plant.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

In addition to the fiber cut discussed above, Cuba’s Internet suffered a second disruption on March 24. A Tweet from ETECSA stated that a power failure had caused a disruption to voice service, SMS, and mobile data. Analysis of Internet traffic for both Cuba and ETECSA finds that the disruption started around 1230 UTC, and lasted for approximately 90 minutes, as shown in the figures below.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022
Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

DDoS attack

Although distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks often target web or application servers in an attempt to knock a given website or application offline, such attacks that target network infrastructure can have more widespread impact, not only restricting access to sites and applications hosted within that network, but also disrupting connectivity for users attached to the network.

Such a DDoS attack targeted AS8867 (E-Gov – Tehila Project) in Israel on March 14. The figure below shows that Internet traffic to that ASN began to decline just before 1530 UTC. A published report notes that the websites of the interior, health, justice and welfare ministries, as well as that of the Prime Minister’s office, were all taken offline as a result of the attack.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

Unspecified technical causes

As discussed above, the underlying technical or physical causes of Internet disruptions are often easily identified, frequently thanks to social media or other communications from the impacted network providers. However, sometimes disruptions are observed that are correlated with a real-world (often political) event with no specified technical or physical cause, while other times disruptions are observed but are both uncorrelated and unattributed.

In Kazakhstan, an Internet disruption began on January 5 amid mass protests against sudden increases in energy prices. Starting around 1030 UTC, traffic from Kazakhstan dropped to near zero. The figure below shows that traffic returned to a regular diurnal pattern on January 11, but several apparent restorations of connectivity are also visible during the six-day disruption. These brief periods of connectivity appeared to align with televised speeches or announcements from the Zazakh president.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

In Burkina Faso, heavy gunfire related to an army mutiny was reported early in the morning of January 23. A significant drop in traffic from the country was observed in Cloudflare Radar starting around 0915 UTC, with Orange, FasoNet, and Telecel Faso all seeing lower traffic volumes. As the figure below shows, the disruption lasted for nearly a day and a half, recovering around 2000 UTC on January 24.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

Just after 2200 UTC on March 15, Yemen experienced a significant, albeit brief, Internet disruption, lasting just 30 minutes. As the figures below show, the disruption was primarily due to an issue at YemenNet. A published report claims that the disruption was due to a deliberate act by the Houthi coup militia.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022
Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

Russian invasion of Ukraine

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has now been going on for over a month. In some cases, Internet connectivity has been collateral damage from the kinetic military action, while in other cases, targeted attacks on network providers and power outages have disrupted connectivity. Technicians from Ukrainian service providers have been risking their lives to keep the country online, and have been largely successful – Cloudflare Radar traffic data for Ukraine shows that as of the end of March, peak traffic levels are at 85-90% of pre-invasion peaks. An earlier blog post provides additional details about Internet traffic patterns observed in Ukraine during the first week after the conflict began.

Below we highlight just a few significant disruptions observed on major Ukrainian network providers in March.

Two brief outages were observed at Ukrtelecom during the second week of March, shown in the figure below. The first, on March 8, lasted for just over two hours, while the second one, on March 10, lasted for approximately 40 minutes. No root cause has been reported for these disruptions.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

Later in the month, on March 28, Ukrtelecom experienced a ~15 hour outage, lasting from 0800 UTC to approximately 0100 on March 29, as seen in the figure below. A Twitter thread from the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine explained that the outage was caused by “a powerful cyberattack” against Ukrtelecom’s infrastructure, and that “In order to preserve its network infrastructure and to continue providing services to Ukraine’s Armed Forces and other military formations as well as to the customers, Ukrtelecom has temporarily limited providing its services to the majority of private users and business-clients.” A LinkedIn post from Ukrtelecom also highlights the non-stop work that the company has been doing to re-establish telecommunications services in impacted regions across the country.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

The figure below shows that around 2100 UTC on March 9, Ukrainian Internet service provider Triolan suffered a significant disruption, reportedly resulting from a cyber attack. Traffic began to gradually return after approximately 10 hours.

Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2022

Conclusion

Despite occasional connectivity disruptions, the Internet remains remarkably resilient. This resiliency is increasingly critical as the Internet finds its way into more and more areas of everyday life around the world. In addition to providing a suite of solutions that support that resiliency, we use the data exhaust from these solutions to monitor Internet reliability, availability, security, and performance.

Follow @CloudflareRadar on Twitter for updates on Internet disruptions as they occur, and find up-to-date information on Internet trends using Cloudflare Radar.

How the Oscars impacted the Internet (at least in the US)

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/oscars-2022-impact/

How the Oscars impacted the Internet (at least in the US)

How the Oscars impacted the Internet (at least in the US)

The 94th Academy Awards happened this past Sunday, March 27, 2022. In the global event we got to see several Oscars attributed to winners like CODA, Jane Campion (the director of The Power of the Dog) and also Dune (which won six Oscars), but also moments that had a clear impact in the Internet traffic, like the altercation on stage between Will Smith and Chris Rock.

Cloudflare Radar uses a variety of sources to provide aggregate information about Internet traffic and attack trends. In this blog post, we will use DNS name resolution data as a proxy for traffic to Internet services, as we did for the Super Bowl LVI.

The baseline value for the charts (that are only focused on the US) was calculated by taking the mean DNS traffic level for the associated Internet services between 08:00 – 12:00 PST on Sunday (March 27, 2022) — usually we use UTC, but we chose to use Los Angeles time as that’s where the event took place.

The event started with Beyoncé singing at 17:00 PST and ended at around 20:30. In terms of growth in traffic, the start of the show didn’t show much for social media, although TikTok and Twitter started to decrease in DNS requests after that time.

Will Smith makes Twitter and TikTok rise in requests

Twitter and TikTok were the social networks that seemed most impacted by the moment Will Smith went on stage and started an altercation with Chris Rock after a joke.

For Twitter, the major change in DNS requests was exactly after that incident (at 19:25); before that, at 18:00, the moment Sebastián Yatra performed Encanto’s Dos Oruguitas song also had a small spike.

How the Oscars impacted the Internet (at least in the US)

There were 32% more DNS requests for Twitter a few minutes after the altercation, and that growth peaked at 20:15 with 51% more requests than there were at 19:20 — that was after Will Smith (20:05) gave his acceptance and apology speech, when he was awarded the Best Actor Oscar. The ceremony ended at 20:30, and after that traffic went down.

TikTok also seemed to be used during the ceremony and the breaks, and after a spike during one of the commercial breaks, around 18:40, after Troy Kotsur won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in CODA.

How the Oscars impacted the Internet (at least in the US)

The Will Smith incident seems to be associated with an increase of 20% in requests from 19:20 to 19:30. The trend continued with a 25% increase (19:40) and a peak of 40% more traffic at 20:15, right after Will Smith’s speech. After the ceremony ended (20:30), traffic went down.

Facebook (yellow line) and Instagram (green) weren’t particularly impacted, although there’s a decrease in traffic after the ceremony started and requests start to decrease after 19:00, especially Facebook.

How the Oscars impacted the Internet (at least in the US)

Actresses made IMDb.com tick

One of the main sources of information about the movie industry is IMDb.com, the Internet Movie Database, and traffic to the site was impacted by the Oscars in a way not related to the Will Smith incident. Requests almost doubled (93% increase) in the minutes before the Oscars started (between 16:50 and 17:00).

How the Oscars impacted the Internet (at least in the US)

And there was another clear spike right after Ariana DeBose won (at 17:23) the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for West Side Story, with almost 90% growth in traffic compared to the previous 10 minutes.

There is also an increase at 19:00, when Kenneth Branagh won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for writing Belfast. The other major spike in traffic, with 55% increase compared to the previous minutes, was right around the time Jessica Chastain got the Oscar for Best Actress for her role in the movie The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

ABC was the official broadcaster for the 2022 Oscars, and throughout the event had good numbers: two hours before the ceremony, ABC.com and also their dedicated page Oscars.com (that redirects to abc.com/shows/oscars) had between 200 to 600% more traffic than in our baseline (the morning period, 08:00 – 12:00 PST).

The biggest spike was around 19:45, a few minutes after the Will Smith incident. This was around the time Questlove received the Best Documentary Oscar for Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), and there was a reunion for The Godfather, with Francis Ford Coppola and actors Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, on stage.

How the Oscars impacted the Internet (at least in the US)

Oscars official website

The official Oscars.org website also had some trends worth mentioning. Requests to the site increased 400% in the hour before the ceremony started, from 16:00 to 17:00, and remained high after that.

How the Oscars impacted the Internet (at least in the US)

But at 19:45 there was a clearer spike in traffic of around 1,300% increase compared to the previous 10 minutes — that was 20 minutes after the Will Smith incident, right after Questlove’s Oscar and at the time of The Godfather reunion. There was another spike right after the Best Actress award and before the event ended. The full list of winners was published on Oscars.org right after 20:30.

So, how about the trends for movie news sites like Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Vulture or E Online? For this we went on to look at the whole Oscars week (the baseline is a mean of the previous Sunday, March 20, 2022). The Oscars Sunday, March 27, was definitely the main day of the week, with DNS requests for those websites growing 833% more than the best days of the week.

How the Oscars impacted the Internet (at least in the US)

That growth was even higher the next day, Monday, March 28, 2022, when traffic rose to 1,200% more than the best days of the previous week.

Conclusion

As we saw with the Super Bowl LVI, an out of the ordinary moment in a popular event, even when it’s broadcasted via television, causes changes in social media and Internet traffic. In the case of the Super Bowl LVI it was the Coinbase ad; here it was an unexpected incident on stage.

Other trends like these can be found on the Cloudflare Radar website or via our dedicated Twitter account.

Cloudflare Radar’s new ASN pages

Post Syndicated from Celso Martinho original https://blog.cloudflare.com/asn-on-radar/

Cloudflare Radar’s new ASN pages

Cloudflare Radar’s new ASN pages

An AS, or Autonomous System, is a group of routable IP prefixes belonging to a single entity, and is one of the key building blocks of the Internet. Internet providers, public clouds, governments, and other organizations have one or more ASes that they use to connect their users or systems to the rest of the Internet by advertising how to reach them.

Per AS traffic statistics and trends help when we need insight into unusual events, like Internet outages, infrastructure anomalies, targeted attacks, or any other changes from service providers.

Today, we are opening more of our data and launching the Cloudflare Radar pages for Autonomous Systems. When navigating to a country or region page on Cloudflare Radar you will see a list of five selected ASes for that country or region. But you shouldn’t feel limited to those, as you can deep dive into any AS by plugging its ASN (Autonomous System Number) into the Radar URL (https://radar.cloudflare.com/asn/<number>). We have excluded some statistical trends from ASes with small amounts of traffic as that data would be difficult to interpret.

Cloudflare Radar’s new ASN pages

The AS page is similar to the country page on Cloudflare Radar. You can find traffic levels, protocol use, and security details such as application and network-level DDoS attack information. Additionally, we show a geographical distribution map of the traffic and the volume of BGP announcements we see for the list of prefixes associated with the specific AS.

Cloudflare Radar’s new ASN pages

A sudden increase in BGP announcements often suggests disruptive changes to the Internet in the region or institution associated with the AS. Spikes in BGP announcements were visible when the submarine cable was cut in Tonga in 2022, on the Facebook outage in October 2021, and when governments limited the Internet access in their countries (as seen in Sudan and Syria in 2021).

Cloudflare Radar’s new ASN pages

At Cloudflare, we are committed to keep increasing transparency on the inner workings of the Internet, so that we can all do our part in keeping the Internet more open and secure for everyone. Keep an eye on Cloudflare Radar for more insights like these.

Application security: Cloudflare’s view

Post Syndicated from Michael Tremante original https://blog.cloudflare.com/application-security/

Application security: Cloudflare’s view

Application security: Cloudflare’s view

Developers, bloggers, business owners, and large corporations all rely on Cloudflare to keep their applications secure, available, and performant.

To meet these goals, over the last twelve years we have built a smart network capable of protecting many millions of Internet properties. As of March 2022, W3Techs reports that:

“Cloudflare is used by 80.6% of all the websites whose reverse proxy service we know. This is 19.7% of all websites”

Netcraft, another provider who crawls the web and monitors adoption puts this figure at more than 20M active sites in their latest Web Server Survey (February 2022):

“Cloudflare continues to make strong gains amongst the million busiest websites, where it saw the only notable increases, with an additional 3,200 sites helping to bring its market share up to 19.4%”

The breadth and diversity of the sites we protect, and the billions of browsers and devices that interact with them, gives us unique insight into the ever-changing application security trends on the Internet. In this post, we share some of those insights we’ve gathered from the 32 million HTTP requests/second that pass through our network.

Definitions

Before we examine the data, it is useful to define the terminology we use. Throughout this post, we will refer to the following terms:

  • Mitigated Traffic: any eyeball HTTP* request that had a “terminating” action applied to by the Cloudflare platform. These include actions such as BLOCK, CHALLENGE (such as captchas or JavaScript based challenges). This does not include requests that had the following actions applied: LOG, SKIP, ALLOW.
  • Bot Traffic/Automated Traffic: any HTTP request identified by Cloudflare’s Bot Management system as being generated by a bot. This includes requests scored between 1 and 29.
  • API Traffic: any HTTP request with a response content type of XML, JSON, gRPC, or similar. Where the response content type is not available, such as for mitigated requests, the equivalent Accept content type (specified by the user agent) is used instead. In this latter case API traffic won’t be fully accounted for, but for insight purposes it still provides a good representation.

Unless otherwise stated, the time frame evaluated in this post is the three-month period from December 1, 2021, to March 1, 2022.

Finally, please note that the data is calculated based only on traffic observed across the Cloudflare network and does not necessarily represent overall HTTP traffic patterns across the Internet.

*When referring to HTTP traffic we mean both HTTP and HTTPS.

Global Traffic Insights

The first thing we can look at is traffic mitigated across all HTTP requests proxied by the Cloudflare network. This will give us a good baseline view before drilling into specific traffic types, such as bot and API traffic.

8% of all Cloudflare HTTP traffic is mitigated

Cloudflare proxies ~32 million HTTP requests per second on average, with more than ~44 million HTTP requests per second at peak. 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.

Site owners using Cloudflare gain access to tools to mitigate unwanted or malicious traffic and allow access to their applications only when a request is deemed clean. This can be done both using fully managed features, such as our DDoS mitigation, WAF managed ruleset or schema validation, as well as custom rules that allow users to define their own filters for blocking traffic.

If we look at the top five Cloudflare features (sources) that mitigated traffic, we get a clear picture of how much each Cloudflare feature is contributing towards helping keep customer sites and applications online and secure:

Application security: Cloudflare’s view

Tabular format for reference:

Source Percentage %
Layer 7 DDoS mitigation 66.0%
Custom WAF Rules 19.0%
Rate Limiting 10.5%
IP Threat Reputation 2.5%
Managed WAF Rules 1.5%

Looking at each mitigation source individually:

  • Layer 7 DDoS mitigation, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the largest contributor to mitigated HTTP requests by total count (66% overall). Cloudflare’s layer 7 DDoS rules are fully managed and don’t require user configuration: they automatically detect a vast array of HTTP DDoS attacks including those generated by the Meris botnet, Mirai botnet, known attack tools, and others. Volumetric DDoS attacks, by definition, create a lot of malicious traffic!
  • Custom WAF Rules contribute to more than 19% of mitigated HTTP traffic. These are user-configured rules defined using Cloudflare’s wirefilter syntax. We explore common rule patterns further down in this post.
  • Our Rate Limiting feature allows customers to define custom thresholds based on application preferences. It is often used as an additional layer of protection for applications against traffic patterns that are too low to be detected as a DDoS attack. Over the time frame analyzed, rate limiting contributed to 10.5% of mitigated HTTP requests.
  • IP Threat Reputation is exposed in the Cloudflare dashboard as Security Level. Based on behavior we observe across the network, Cloudflare automatically assigns a threat score to each IP address. When the threat score is above the specified threshold, we challenge the traffic. This accounts for 2.5% of all mitigated HTTP requests.
  • Our Managed WAF Rules are rules that are handcrafted by our internal security analyst team aimed at matching only against valid malicious payloads. They contribute to about 1.5% of all mitigated requests.

HTTP anomalies are the most common attack vector

If we drill into Managed WAF Rules, we get a clear picture of what type of attack vectors malicious users are attempting against the Internet properties we protect.

The vast majority (over 54%) of HTTP requests blocked by our Managed WAF Rules contain HTTP anomalies, such as malformed method names, null byte characters in headers, non-standard ports or content length of zero with a POST request.

Common attack types in this category are shown below. These have been grouped when relevant:

Rule Type Description
Missing User Agent These rules will block any request without a User-Agent header. All browsers and legitimate crawlers present this header when connecting to a site. Not having a user agent is a common signal of a malicious request.
Not GET, POST or HEAD Method Most applications only allow standard GET or POST requests (normally used for viewing pages or submitting forms). HEAD requests are also often sent from browsers for security purposes. Customers using our Managed Rules can easily block any other method – which normally results in blocking a large number of vulnerability scanners.
Missing Referer When users navigate applications, browsers use the Referer header to indicate where they are coming from. Some applications expect this header to always be present.
Non-standard port Customers can configure Cloudflare Managed Rules to block HTTP requests trying to access non-standard ports (such as 80 and 443). This is activity normally seen by vulnerability scanners.
Invalid UTF-8 encoding It is common for attackers to attempt to break an application server by sending “special” characters that are not valid in UTF-8 encoding.

More commonly known and referenced attack vectors such as XSS and SQLi only contribute to about 13% of total mitigated requests. More interestingly, attacks aimed at information disclosure are third most popular (10%) and software-specific CVE-based attacks account for about 12% of mitigated requests (more than SQLi alone) highlighting both the importance of needing to patch software quickly, and the likelihood of CVE proof-of-concepts (PoCs) being used to compromise applications, such as with the recent Log4J vulnerability. The top 10 attack vectors by percentage of mitigated requests are shown below:

Application security: Cloudflare’s view

Tabular format for reference:

Source Percentage %
HTTP Anomaly 54.5%
Vendor Specific CVE 11.8%
Information Disclosure 10.4%
SQLi 7.0%
XSS 6.1%
File Inclusion 3.3%
Fake Bots 3.0%
Command Injection 2.7%
Open Redirects 0.1%
Other 1.5%

Businesses still rely on IP address-based access lists to protect their assets

In the prior section, we noted that 19% of mitigated requests come from Custom WAF Rules. These are rules that Cloudflare customers have implemented using the wirefilter syntax. At time of writing, Cloudflare customers had a total of ~6.5 million Custom WAF rules deployed.

It is interesting to look at what rule fields customers are using to identify malicious traffic, as this helps us focus our efforts on what other fully automated mitigations could be implemented to improve the Cloudflare platform.

The most common field, found in approximately 64% of all custom rules, remains the source IP address or fields easily derived from the IP address, such as the client country location. Note that IP addresses are becoming less useful signals for security policies, but they are often the quickest and simplest type of filter to implement during an attack. Customers are also starting to adopt better approaches such as those offered in our Zero Trust portfolio to further reduce reliance on IP address-based fields.

The top 10 fields are shown below:

Application security: Cloudflare’s view

Tabular format for reference:

Field name Used in % of rules
ip 64.9%
ip_geoip_country 27.3%
http_request_uri 24.1%
http_user_agent 21.8%
http_request_uri_path 17.8%
http_referer 8.6%
cf_client_bot 8.3%
http_host 7.8%
ip_geoip_asnum 5.8%
cf_threat_score 4.4%

Beyond IP addresses, standard HTTP request fields (URI, User-Agent, Path, Referer) tend to be the most popular. Note, also, that across the entire rule corpus, the average rule combines at least three independent fields.

Bot Traffic Insights

Cloudflare has long offered a Bot Management solution to allow customers to gain insights into the automated traffic that might be accessing their application. Using Bot Management classification data, we can perform a deep dive into the world of bots.

38% of HTTP traffic is automated

Over the time period analyzed, bot traffic accounted for about 38% of all HTTP requests. This traffic includes bot traffic from hundreds of Verified Bots tracked by Cloudflare, as well as any request that received a bot score below 30, indicating a high likelihood that it is automated.

Overall, when bot traffic matches a security configuration, customers allow 41% of bot traffic to pass to their origins, blocking only 6.4% of automated requests. Remember that this includes traffic coming from Verified Bots like GoogleBot, which ultimately benefits site owners and end users. It’s a reminder that automation in and of itself is not necessarily detrimental to a site.  This is why we segment Verified Bot traffic, and why we give customers a granular bot score, rather than a binary “bot or not bot” indicator. Website operators want the flexibility to be precise with their response to different types of bot traffic, and we can see that they do in fact use this flexibility. Note that our self-serve customers can also decide how to handle bot traffic using our Super Bot Fight Mode feature.

Application security: Cloudflare’s view

Tabular data for reference:

Action on all bot traffic Percentage %
allow 40.9%
log 31.9%
bypass 19.0%
block 6.4%
jschallenge 0.5%

More than a third of non-verified bot HTTP traffic is mitigated

31% of all bot traffic observed by Cloudflare is not verified, and comes from thousands of custom-built automated tools like scanners, crawlers, and bots built by hackers. As noted above, automation does not necessarily mean these bots are performing malicious actions. If we look at customer responses to identified bot traffic, we find that 38.5% of HTTP requests from non-verified bots are mitigated. This is obviously a much more defensive configuration compared to overall bot traffic actions shown above:

Application security: Cloudflare’s view

Tabular data for reference:

Action on non-verified bot traffic Percentage %
block 34.0%
log 28.6%
allow 14.5%
bypass 13.2%
managed_challenge 3.7%

You’ll notice that almost 30% of customers log traffic rather than take immediate action. We find that many enterprise customers choose to not immediately block bot traffic, so they don’t give a feedback signal to attackers. Rather, they prefer to tag and monitor this traffic, and either drop at a later time or redirect to alternate content. As targeted attack vectors have evolved, responses to those attacks have had to evolve and become more sophisticated as well. Additionally, nearly 3% of non-verified bot traffic is automatically mitigated by our DDoS protection (connection_close). These requests tend to be part of botnets used to attack customer applications.

API Traffic Insights

Many applications built on the Internet today are not meant to be consumed by humans. Rather, they are intended for computer-to-computer communication. The common way to expose an application for this purpose is to build an Application Programming Interface (API) that can be accessed using HTTP.

Due to the underlying format of the data in transit, API traffic tends to be a lot more structured than standard web applications, causing all sorts of problems from a security standpoint. First, the structured data often causes Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) to generate a large number of false positives. Secondly, due to the nature of APIs, they often go unnoticed, and many companies end up exposing old and unmaintained APIs without knowing, often referred to as “shadow APIs”.

Below, we look at some differences in API trends compared to the global traffic insights shown above.

10% of API traffic is mitigated at the edge

A good portion of bot traffic is accessing API endpoints, and as discussed previously, API traffic is the fastest growing traffic type on the Cloudflare network, currently accounting for 55% of total requests.

API endpoints globally receive more malicious requests compared to standard web applications (10% vs 8%) potentially indicating that attackers are focusing more on APIs for their attack surface as opposed to standard web apps.

Our DDoS mitigation is still the top source of mitigated events for API endpoints, accounting for just over 63% of the total mitigated requests. More interestingly, Custom WAF rules account for 35% compared to 19% when looking at global traffic. Customers have, to date, been heavily using WAF Custom Rules to lock down and validate traffic to API endpoints, although we expect our API Gateway schema validation feature to soon surpass Custom WAF Rules in terms of mitigated traffic.

SQLi is the most common attack vector on API endpoints

If we look at our WAF Managed Rules mitigations on API traffic only, we see notable differences compared to global trends. These differences include much more equal distribution across different types of attacks, but more noticeably, SQL injection attacks in the top spot.

Command Injection attacks are also much more prominent (14.3%), and vectors such as Deserialization make an appearance, contributing to more than 1% of the total mitigated requests.

Application security: Cloudflare’s view

Tabular data for reference:

Source Percentage %
SQLi 34.5%
HTTP Anomaly 18.2%
Vendor Specific CVE 14.5%
Command Injection 14.3%
XSS 7.3%
Fake Bots 5.8%
File Inclusion 2.3%
Deserialization 1.2%
Information Disclosure 0.6%
Other 1.3%

Looking ahead

In this post we shared some initial insights around Internet application security trends based on traffic to Cloudflare’s network. Of course, we have only just scratched the surface. Moving forward, we plan to publish quarterly reports with dynamic filters directly on Cloudflare Radar and provide much deeper insights and investigations.

DNSSEC issues take Fiji domains offline

Post Syndicated from David Belson original https://blog.cloudflare.com/dnssec-issues-fiji/

DNSSEC issues take Fiji domains offline

DNSSEC issues take Fiji domains offline

On the morning of March 8, a post to Hacker News stated that “All .fj domains have gone offline”, listing several hostnames in domains within the Fiji top level domain (known as a ccTLD) that had become unreachable. Commenters in the associated discussion thread had mixed results in being able to reach .fj hostnames—some were successful, while others saw failures. The fijivillage news site also highlighted the problem, noting that the issue also impacted Vodafone’s M-PAiSA app/service, preventing users from completing financial transactions.

The impact of this issue can be seen in traffic to Cloudflare customer zones in the .com.fj second-level domain. The graph below shows that HTTP traffic to these zones dropped by approximately 40% almost immediately starting around midnight UTC on March 8. Traffic volumes continued to decline throughout the rest of the morning.

DNSSEC issues take Fiji domains offline

Looking at Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 resolver data for queries for .com.fj hostnames, we can also see that error volume associated with those queries climbs significantly starting just after midnight as well. This means that our resolvers encountered issues with the answers from .fj servers.

DNSSEC issues take Fiji domains offline

This observation suggests that the problem was strictly DNS related, rather than connectivity related—Cloudflare Radar does not show any indication of an Internet disruption in Fiji coincident with the start of this problem.

DNSSEC issues take Fiji domains offline

It was suggested within the Hacker News comments that the problem could be DNSSEC related. Upon further investigation, it appears that may be the cause. In verifying the DNSSEC record for the .fj ccTLD, shown in the dig output below, we see that it states EDE: 9 (DNSKEY Missing): 'no SEP matching the DS found for fj.'

kdig fj. soa +dnssec @1.1.1.1 
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY; status: SERVFAIL; id: 12710
;; Flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1; ANSWER: 0; AUTHORITY: 0; ADDITIONAL: 1
 
;; EDNS PSEUDOSECTION:
;; Version: 0; flags: do; UDP size: 1232 B; ext-rcode: NOERROR
;; EDE: 9 (DNSKEY Missing): 'no SEP matching the DS found for fj.'
 
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;; fj.                          IN      SOA
 
;; Received 73 B
;; Time 2022-03-08 08:57:41 EST
;; From 1.1.1.1@53(UDP) in 17.2 ms

Extended DNS Error 9 (EDE: 9) is defined as “A DS record existed at a parent, but no supported matching DNSKEY record could be found for the child.” The Cloudflare Learning Center article on DNSKEY and DS records explains this relationship:

The DS record is used to verify the authenticity of child zones of DNSSEC zones. The DS key record on a parent zone contains a hash of the KSK in a child zone. A DNSSEC resolver can therefore verify the authenticity of the child zone by hashing its KSK record, and comparing that to what is in the parent zone’s DS record.

Ultimately, it appears that around midnight UTC, the .fj zone started to be signed with a key that was not in the root zone DS, possibly as the result of a scheduled rollover that happened without checking that the root zone was updated first by IANA, which updates the root zone. (IANA owns contact with the TLD operators, and instructs the Root Zone Publisher on the changes to make in the next version of the root zone.)

DNSSEC problems as the root cause of the observed issue align with the observation in the Hacker News comments that some were able to access .fj websites, while others were not. Users behind resolvers doing strict DNSSEC validation would have seen an error in their browser, while users behind less strict resolvers would have been able to access the sites without a problem.

Conclusion

Further analysis of Cloudflare resolver metrics indicates that the problem was resolved around 1400 UTC, when the DS was updated. When DNSSEC is improperly configured for a single domain name, it can cause problems accessing websites or applications in that zone. However, when the misconfiguration occurs at a ccTLD level, the impact is much more significant. Unfortunately, this seems to occur all too often.

(Thank you to Ólafur Guðmundsson for his DNSSEC expertise.)

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Post Syndicated from John Graham-Cumming original https://blog.cloudflare.com/internet-traffic-patterns-in-ukraine-since-february-21-2022/

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Cloudflare operates in more than 250 cities worldwide where we connect our equipment to the Internet to provide our broad range of services. We have data centers in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia and across the world. To operate our service we monitor traffic trends, performance and errors seen at each data center, aggregate data about DNS, and congestion and packet loss on Internet links.

Internet Traffic

For reference, here is a map of Ukraine showing its major cities. Note that whenever we talk about dates and times in this post, we are using UTC. Ukraine’s current time zone is UTC+2.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022
© OpenStreetMap contributors

Internet traffic in Ukraine generally follows a pretty predictable pattern based on day and night. Lowest in the hours after local midnight and picking up as people wake up. It’s not uncommon to see a dip around lunchtime and a peak when people go home in the evening. That pattern is clearly visible in this chart of overall Internet traffic seen by Cloudflare for Ukrainian networks on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday prior to the invasion.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Starting Thursday, traffic was significantly lower. On Thursday, we saw about 70% of our normal request volume and about 60% on Friday. Request volumes recovered to 70% of pre-invasion volume on Saturday and Sunday before peaking on Monday and Tuesday because of attacks that we mitigated coming from networks in Ukraine.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

This chart shows attack traffic blocked by Cloudflare that originated on networks in Ukraine. Note that this is quite different from attacks against .ua domains, which can originate anywhere in the world and are discussed below.

Analysis of network traffic from different cities in Ukraine gives us some insight into people’s use of the Internet and availability of Internet access. Here’s Internet traffic from the capital, Kyiv:

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Once again the “normal” ebb and flow of Internet traffic is seen on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Early on Thursday morning, Internet traffic picks up after Vladimir Putin’s announcement of the attack but never reaches normal levels that day. Friday is even lower, but traffic in Kyiv has gradually increased since then.

Moving westward to Lviv, we see a very different pattern of use.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

The same normal flows on Monday to Wednesday are visible, followed by a smaller drop for three days and then a dramatic increase in traffic. As many Ukrainians have moved westward towards Poland, Slovakia and Romania, away from the fighting, it appears that Internet traffic has grown with their arrival in Lviv.

The city of Uzhhorod on the Slovakian border shows a similar pattern.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

To the east of Lviv, the city of Ternopil has also seen an increase in Internet traffic.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

As has Rivne.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Looking at Rivne, Ternopil, Uzhhorod, and Lviv, it’s possible that the peaks in Internet traffic on different days show the movement of people westward as they try to escape fighting around the capital and in the east and south.

On the opposite side of Ukraine, the situation is quite different. Here’s the traffic pattern for the city of Kharkiv. It has stayed at roughly between 50% and 60% (March 3) of the usual rate since the beginning of the invasion.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

North of Kharkiv, the city of Sumy (north-eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border), traffic levels are very low since yesterday, March 3, 2022.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

A similar trend can be seen in the city Izyum, south of Kharkiv (east of Ukraine), where traffic is very low since March 2.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Traffic in Donetsk has remained fairly consistent throughout the invasion, except for March 1 when there was a dramatic change in traffic. This was most likely caused by an attack against a single .ua domain name, with the attack traffic coming, at least in part, from Donetsk.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Some other areas with fighting have experienced the largest drops and partial Internet outages. Moving to the south, traffic in Mariupol declined after the invasion and has dropped dramatically in the last three days with outages on local networks.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Here’s a view of traffic from AS43554 in Mariupol showing what seems to be a total outage on March 1 that continued through March 4.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

To the west of Mariupol, Osypenko shows a gradual decline in traffic followed by three days of minimal Internet use.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Similar large drops are seen in Irpin (just outside Kyiv to the northwest).

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

And in Bucha, which is next to Irpin; both Bucha and Irpin are close to Hostomel airport.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Enerhodar is the small city in the south of Ukraine where Europe’s largest nuclear plant, Zaporizhzhya NPP, is located.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

There has also been minimal traffic (or possible outage) from Severodonetsk (north of Luhansk) for the past four of days.

We have started to see traffic from Starlink terminals in Ukraine, although traffic levels remain very low.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Cyberattacks

The physical world invasion has been accompanied by an increase in cyberattacks against Ukrainian domain names and networks.

Just prior to the invasion, on February 23, Cloudflare’s automated systems detected a large amount of packet loss on a major Internet connection to our Kyiv data center and automatically mitigated the problem by routing traffic onto other networks. This packet loss was caused by congestion on the transit provider’s network, which in turn was caused by a large DDoS attack. It appeared in our dashboards as packet loss over a 30-minute period between 1500-1530 (the different colors are different parts of our network infrastructure in Kyiv).

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

This next chart gives an overview of traffic to .ua domains protected by Cloudflare and requests that are “mitigated” (i.e. blocked by our firewall products). The chart shows only layer 7 traffic and does not give information about layer 3/4 DDoS, which is covered separately below.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

On the first day of the invasion attacks against .ua domains were prevalent and at times responsible for almost 50% of the requests being sent to those domains. From Friday, February 25 attacks returned to levels seen prior to the invasion and started picking up again on Tuesday, March 1.

Digging into the layer 7 mitigations we can see that the biggest attacks over all are layer 7 DDoS attacks.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

The next largest attacks are being mitigated by firewall rules put in place by customers.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Followed by blocking requests based on our IP threat reputation database.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Layer 3/4 traffic is harder to attribute to a specific domain or target as IP addresses are shared across different customers. Looking at network-level DDoS traffic hitting our Kyiv data center, we see occasional peaks of DDoS traffic reaching a high of nearly  1.8 Gbps.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Note that although the layer 3/4 and layer 7 attacks we are mitigating have been relatively small, that does not mean they are not devastating or problematic. A small website or service can be taken down by relatively small attacks, and the layer 7 attack traffic often includes vulnerability scanning, credential stuffing, SQL injection, and the usual panoply of techniques carried out to either deface or penetrate an Internet service.

Unprotected Internet properties are vulnerable to even small attacks and need protection.

Social media and communications

Much of the imagery and information coming out of Ukraine is being shared on social networks. Looking at social networks in Ukraine via DNS data shows that Facebook use has increased.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

As has Instagram.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

However, TikTok seems to have lost traffic initially, but it has started to return (although not to its pre-conflict levels) in the last two days.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Twitter usage increased and has remained higher than levels seen before the invasion.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Turning to messaging apps, we can compare Messenger, Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp. WhatsApp traffic appears to have declined inline with the broad change in Internet traffic across Ukraine.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Telegram stayed largely unchanged until early this week, when we observed a small increase in use.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Messenger shows a similar pattern.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

But the largest change has been traffic to the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal, which has seen dramatic growth since the invasion began. We are seeing 8x to 10x the DNS volume for Signal as compared to the days before the start of the conflict.

Internet traffic patterns in Ukraine since February 21, 2022

Internet is back in Tonga after 38 days of outage

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/internet-is-back-in-tonga-after-38-days-of-outage/

Internet is back in Tonga after 38 days of outage

Internet is back in Tonga after 38 days of outage

Tonga, the South Pacific archipelago nation (with 169 islands), was reconnected to the Internet this early morning (UTC) and is back online after successful repairs to the undersea cable that was damaged on Saturday, January 15, 2022, by the January 14, volcanic eruption.

After 38 days without full access to the Internet, Cloudflare Radar shows that a little after midnight (UTC) — it was around 13:00 local time — on February 22, 2022, Internet traffic in Tonga started to increase to levels similar to those seen before the eruption.

Internet is back in Tonga after 38 days of outage

The faded line shows what was normal in Tonga at the start of the year, and the dark blue line shows the evolution of traffic in the last 30 days. Digicel, Tonga’s main ISP announced at 02:13 UTC that “data connectivity has been restored on the main island Tongatapu and Eua after undersea submarine cable repairs”.

When we expand the view to the previous 45 days, we can see more clearly how Internet traffic evolved before the volcanic eruption and after the undersea cable was repaired.

Internet is back in Tonga after 38 days of outage

The repair ship Reliance took 20 days to replace a 92 km (57 mile) section of the 827 km submarine fiber optical cable that connects Tonga to Fiji and international networks and had “multiple faults and breaks due to the volcanic eruption”, according to Digicel.

Tonga Cable chief executive James Panuve told Reuters that people on the main island “will have access almost immediately”, and that was what we saw on Radar with a large increase in traffic persisting.

Internet is back in Tonga after 38 days of outage

The residual traffic we saw from Tonga a few days after January 15, 2022, comes from satellite services that were used with difficulty by some businesses.

James Panuve also highlighted that the undersea work is still being finished to repair the domestic cable connecting the main island of Tongatapu with outlying islands that were worst hit by the tsunami, which, he told Reuters, could take six to nine months more.

So, for some of the people who live on the 36 inhabited islands, normal use of the Internet could take a lot longer. Tonga has a population of around 105,000, 70% of whom reside on the main island, Tongatapu and around 5% (5,000) live on the nearby island of Eua (now also connected to the Internet).

Telecommunication companies in neighboring Pacific islands, particularly New Caledonia, provided lengths of cable when Tonga ran out, said Panuve.

A world of undersea cables for the world’s communications

We have mentioned before, for example in our first blog post about the Tonga outage, how undersea cables are important to global Internet traffic that is mostly carried by a complex network that connects countries and continents.

The full submarine cable system (the first communications cables laid were from the 1850s and carried telegraphy traffic) is what makes most of the world’s Internet function between countries and continents. There are 428 active submarine cables (36 are planned), running to an estimated 1.3 million km around the globe.

Internet is back in Tonga after 38 days of outage
World map of submarine cables. Antartida is the only continent not yet reached by a submarine telecommunications cable. Source: TeleGeography (www.submarinecablemap.com

The reliability of submarine Internet is high, especially when multiple paths are available in the event of a cable break. That wasn’t the case for the Tonga outage, given that the 827 km submarine cable only connects Fiji to the Tonga archipelago — Fiji is connected to the main Southern Cross Cable, as the next image illustrates.

Internet is back in Tonga after 38 days of outage
Submarine Cable Map shows the undersea cables that connect Australia to Fiji and the following connections to other archipelagos like Tonga. Source: TeleGeography (www.submarinecablemap.com)

In a recent conversation on a Cloudflare TV segment we discussed the importance of undersea cables with Tom Paseka, Network Strategist who is celebrating 10 years at Cloudflare and worked previously for undersea cable companies in Australia. Here’s a clip:

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/who-won-super-bowl-lvi-a-look-at-internet-traffic-during-the-big-game/

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

“It’s ridiculous for a country to get all worked up about a game—except the Super Bowl, of course. Now that’s important.”
– Andy Rooney, American radio and television writer

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

When the Super Bowl is on, there are more winners than just one of the teams playing, especially when we look at Internet trends. By now, everyone knows that the Los Angeles Rams won, but we also want to look at which Super Bowl advertisers were the biggest winners, and how traffic to food delivery services, social media and messaging apps, and sports and betting websites changed throughout the game.

We covered some of these questions during our Super Bowl live-tweeting on our Cloudflare Radar account. (Hint: follow us if you’re interested in Internet trends).

Cloudflare Radar uses a variety of sources to provide aggregate information about Internet traffic and attack trends. In this blog post, as we did last year, we use DNS name resolution data to estimate traffic to websites. We can’t see who visited the websites mentioned, or what anyone did on the websites, but DNS can give us an estimate of the interest generated by the ads or across a set of sites in the categories listed above.

The baseline value for the charts was calculated by taking the mean traffic level for the associated websites during 12:00 – 15:00 EST on Super Bowl Sunday (February 13, 2022).

The Big Picture

Focusing on the two teams that made it to the big game and to get the ball rolling already, the Bengals website had some spikes before kickoff and during the second half, but the Rams website had a great run and just like on the field, had their biggest peak at the end.


Super Bowl Sunday is not only about the ads – part of the excitement around watching the game with friends and family is having a great assortment of food and snacks. So, let’s start with the aggregated traffic to a set of food delivery services that clearly builds to a peak around 17:30, one hour before kickoff. After that, traffic generally decreases but increases slightly after the second half starts.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

When we look at traffic to sports websites, there’s a build up to a peak as the game began at 18:30.

As the game progressed, traffic dropped off, but spiked three times during halftime (between 20:00 and 20:30). After the Rams victory was assured, traffic to those websites saw a final peak.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

We can also see below that aggregated traffic to video platforms had a pattern similar to sports websites, with two peaks at halftime and a third notable one at the end of the game. After kickoff (18:30) the first peak occurred around the same time Coinbase’s bouncing QR code commercial aired.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

How about social media? Aggregate traffic to social media sites started to decrease after 17:00, hitting its lowest point just before kickoff.

During the game, there was a clear spike (the biggest of the afternoon/evening) after the Coinbase QR code ad aired. At halftime, social media traffic dropped off before peaking again right before the second half started. A final peak occurred after the game ended.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

Finally, let’s look at messaging services. Among this set of domains, there wasn’t as much of a decrease as we saw in social media heading into kickoff, but there was a spike around 19:00 after the second batch of commercials was aired. Traffic continued to grow through halftime and into the third quarter before starting to drop heading towards the end of the game. Similar to several of the other categories above, messaging traffic again rose after the end of the game.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

The Internet Impact of Commercials

Historically, many people have watched the Super Bowl as much for the ads as the actual football game. (Maybe even more so some years…) Many of the advertisements are now posted online ahead of Super Bowl Sunday. Given that, do these commercials still drive traffic to the company’s web site while the game is on?” As we saw in 2021, the answer remains a resounding yes.

The first Bud Light ad during the game (at 18:52) drove a more than 25x increase to their site, and the Bud Light Seltzer Hard Soda ad with Guy Fieri at 21:00 drove a second peak in traffic, with a 15x increase over baseline.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

The Pringles commercial (at 21:00), where a hand stuck in a Pringles can really stuck with viewers, resulted in a greater than 35x increase. On the other hand, Lays got a 30x bump in traffic from their wedding memories ad at 20:53.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

The Doritos website had already experienced some spikes throughout the afternoon, but jungle animals singing the Salt-N-Pepa hit ‘Push It’  (19:13) drove a more than 12x increase in traffic. However, last year’s ad with a flat virtual Matthew McConaughey seemed to have more impact.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

Brands that might not be so well known often get a large traffic boost from their Super Bowl commercials. For example, the cocktail company Cutwater Spirits “here’s to the lazy ones” ad, their first at the Super Bowl, resulted in an 800x increase in traffic. (The Michelob Ultra bowling ad with Peyton Manning drive a similar increase in traffic.:

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

Financial services: the QR code

We already saw that the Coinbase ad seems to have made social media tick up after its ad aired, but what about traffic to them? The ad drove a 14x increase in traffic. (However, it is worth noting that scanning the QR code in the advertisement took viewers to drops.coinbase.com – this specific hostname is not included in the traffic analyzed for this graph.)

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

In comparison, the Crypto.com ad featuring LeBron James having a conversation with his 2003 self generated a 3x increase in traffic to their website, while the FTX ad where Larry David gives bad advice through human history only resulted in 1.5x traffic growth.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

On the other hand, the eToro “to the moon” ad that ran during the second half of the game drove a 25x increase in traffic (at halftime there was another 20x bump).

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

In the classic financial services world, there was another kid on the block that experienced a much bigger bump (140x) in traffic growth. The Greenlight ad featuring Modern Family’s Phil Dunphy’s (Ty Burrell) purchasing habits aired late in the game, (21:45) but clearly made an impact.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

Electric cars (Dr. Evil) takeover

Car commercials have aired for many years during the Super Bowl, teasing new models and technologies. In 2022, electric cars were (again) a popular subject of Super Bowl ads. Bending modern day, 80’s nostalgia, and ancient mythology, BMW rocked down to Electric Avenue as their ad (18:54) resulted in a 14x increase over baseline in traffic.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

However, our data showed that there was a clear winner among automobile makers: the Dr. Evil (one of Mike Myers’s characters from Austin Powers) takeover of General Motors ad drove traffic to a peak of over 400x above baseline.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

Ads from other car vendors including Toyota (5x), Kia (16x), Vroom (70x), Nissan (30x) also generated attention and increased traffic to their websites. Highlighting the importance of charging to the electric car ecosystem, the first ever Super Bowl ad from Wallbox (a manufacturer of electric car chargers) powered a huge increase in traffic to their website, reaching a peak over 2,500x higher than baseline.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

Last but not least

One of the health-related products that had made its mark on the Super Bowl was the early detection medical service Hologic that featured Mary J. Blige. They experienced a 140x traffic spike.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

Another example that really showed that having a successful Super Bowl commercial doesn’t stink was for Irish Spring soap. Their good ‘smelling’ ad drove a traffic increase to their website of nearly 200x over baseline.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

Among ads for travel-related companies, the biggest increase in traffic we saw was from Booking.com (21:23), with the adventures of Idris Elba gaining them a 1.6x bump.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

Several ads promoted shows and movie trailers, including Dr. Strange 2 and Amazon Prime Video’s The Rings of Power, but the trailer for Jordan Peele’s Nope movie generated a nearly 40x increase in traffic.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

And the winner is…

Popular smart home gadgets appeared to be jealous of the new COVID-19 testing device from Cue Health, but Super Bowl viewers were clearly curious about it. The company’s ad drove an astronomical 10,000x increase in traffic to their website after it aired.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

Conclusion

We saw again that when humans change their behavior that impacts the Internet traffic (the network of networks is, after all, a human invention for humans).

Remember, visit Cloudflare Radar for up to date Internet traffic and attack trends and follow the Cloudflare Radar Twitter account for regular insights on Internet events.

Who won Super Bowl LVI? A look at Internet traffic during the big game

Landscape of API Traffic

Post Syndicated from Daniele Molteni original https://blog.cloudflare.com/landscape-of-api-traffic/

Landscape of API Traffic

Landscape of API Traffic

In recent years we have witnessed an explosion of Internet-connected applications. Whether it is a new mobile app to find your soulmate, the latest wearable to monitor your vitals, or an industrial solution to detect corrosion, our life is becoming packed with connected systems.

How is the Internet changing because of this shift? This blog provides an overview of how Internet traffic is evolving as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have taken the centre stage among the communication technologies. With help from the Cloudflare Radar team, we have harnessed the data from our global network to provide this snapshot of global APIs in 2021.

The huge growth in API traffic comes at a time when Cloudflare has been introducing new technologies that protect applications from nascent threats and vulnerabilities. The release of API Shield with API Discovery, Schema Validation, mTLS and API Abuse Detection has provided customers with a set of tools designed to protect their applications and data based on how APIs work and their challenges.

We are also witnessing increased adoption of new protocols. Among encryption protocols, for example, TLS v1.3 has become the most used protocol for APIs on Cloudflare while, for transport protocols, we saw an uptake of QUIC and gRPC (Cloudflare support announced in 2018 and 2020 respectively).

In the following sections we will quantify the growth of APIs and identify key industries affected by this shift. We will also look at the data to better understand the source and type of traffic we see on our network including how much malicious traffic our security systems block.

Why is API use exploding?

By working closely with our customers and observing the broader trends and data across our network in application security, we have identified three main trends behind API adoption: how applications are built is changing, API-first businesses are thriving, and finally machine-to-machine and human-to-machine communication is evolving.

During the last decade, APIs became popular because they allowed developers to separate backend and frontend, thus creating applications with better user experience. The Jamstack architecture is the most recent trend highlighting this movement, where technologies such as JavaScript, APIs and markup are being used to create responsive and high-performance applications. The growth of microservices and serverless architectures are other drivers behind using efficient HTTP-powered application interfaces.

APIs are also enabling companies to innovate their business models. Across many industries there is a trend of modularizing complex processes by integrating self-contained workflows and operations. The product has become the service delivered via APIs, allowing companies to scale and monetize their new capabilities. Financial Services is a prime example where a monolithic industry with vertically integrated service providers is giving way to a more fragmented landscape. The new Open Banking standard (PSD2) is an example of how small companies can provide modular financial services that can be easily integrated into larger applications. Companies like TrueLayer have productized APIs, allowing e-commerce organizations to onboard new sellers to a marketplace within seconds or to deliver more efficient payment options for their customers. A similar shift is happening in the logistics industry as well, where Shippo allows the same e-commerce companies to integrate with services to initiate deliveries, print labels, track goods and streamline the returns process. And of course, everything is powered by APIs.

Finally, the increase of connected devices such as wearables, sensors and robots are driving more APIs, but another aspect of this is the way manual and repetitive tasks are being automated. Infrastructure-as-Code is an example of relying on APIs to replace manual processes that have been used to manage Internet Infrastructure in the past. Cloudflare is itself a product of this trend as our solutions allow customers to use services like Terraform to configure how their infrastructure should work with our products.

Labelling traffic

The data presented in the following paragraphs is based on the total traffic proxied by Cloudflare and traffic is classified according to the Content-Type header generated in the response phase. Only requests returning a 200 response were included in the analysis except for the analysis in the ‘Security’ section where other error codes were included. Traffic generated by identified bots is not included.

When looking at trends, we compare data from the first week of February 2021 to the first week of December 2021. We chose these dates to compare how traffic changed over the year but excluding January which is affected by the holiday season.

Specifically, API traffic is labelled based on responses with types equal application/json, application/xml, and text/xml, while Web accounts for text/html, application/x-javascript, application/javascript, text/css, and text/javascript. Requests categorised as Text are text/plain; Binary are application/octet-stream; Media includes all image types, video and audio.

Finally, Other catches everything that doesn’t clearly fall into the labels above, which includes empty and unknown. Part of this traffic might be API and the categorisation might be missing due to the client or server not adding a Content-Type header.

API use in 2021

We begin by examining the current state of API traffic at our global network and the types of content served. During the first week of December 2021, API calls represented 54% of total requests, up from 52% during the first week of February 2021.

Landscape of API Traffic

When looking at individual data types, API was by far the fastest growing data type (+21%) while Web only grew by 10%. Media (such as images and videos) grew just shy of 15% while binary was the only traffic that in aggregate experienced a reduction of 6%.

Landscape of API Traffic

In summary, APIs have been one of the drivers of the traffic growth experienced by the Cloudflare network in 2021. APIs account for more than half of the total traffic generated by end users and connected devices, and they’re growing twice as fast as traditional web traffic.

New industries are contributing to this increase

We analysed where this growth comes from in terms of industry and application types. When looking at the total volume of API traffic, unsurprisingly the general Internet and Software industry accounts for almost 40% of total API traffic in 2021. The second-largest industry in terms of size is Cryptocurrency (7% of API traffic) followed by Banking and Retail (6% and 5% of API traffic respectively).

The following chart orders industries according to their API traffic growth. Banking, Retail and Financial Services have experienced the largest year-on-year growth with 70%, 51% and 50% increases since February 2021, respectively.

Landscape of API Traffic

The growth of Banking and Financial Services traffic is aligned with the trends we have observed anecdotally in the sector. The industry has seen the entrance of a number of new platforms that aggregate accounts from different providers, streamline transactions, or allow investing directly from apps, all of which rely heavily on APIs. The new “challenger banks” movement is an example where newer startups are offering captivating mobile services based on APIs while putting pressure on larger institutions to modernise their infrastructure and applications.

A closer look at the API characteristics

Generally speaking, a RESTful API request is a call to invoke a function. It includes the address of a specific resource (the endpoint) and the action you want to perform on that resource (method). A payload might be present to carry additional data and HTTP headers might be populated to add information about the origin of the call, what software is requesting data, requisite authentication credentials, etc. The method (or verb) expresses the action you want to perform, such as retrieve information (GET) or update information (POST).

It’s useful to understand the composition and origin of API traffic, such as the most commonly used methods, the most common protocol used to encode the payload, or what service generates traffic (like Web, mobile apps, or IoT). This information will help us identify the macro source of vulnerabilities and design and deploy the best tools to protect traffic.

Methods

The vast majority of API traffic is the result of POST or GET requests (98% of all requests). POST itself accounts for 53.4% of all requests and GET 44.4%. Generally speaking, GET tends to transfer sensitive data in the HTTP request header, query and in the response body, while POST typically transfers data in the request header and body. While many security tools apply to both of these types of calls, this distinction can be useful when deploying tools such as API Schema Validation (request and response) or Data Loss Prevention/Sensitive Data Detection (response), both launched by Cloudflare in March 2021.

Landscape of API Traffic

Payload encoding review

API payloads encode data using different rules and languages that are commonly referred to as transport protocols. When looking at the breakdown between two of the most common protocols, JSON has by far the largest number of requests (~97%) while XML has a smaller share of requests as it still carries the heaviest traffic. In the following figure, JSON and XML are compared in terms of response sizes. XML is the most verbose protocol and the one handling the largest payloads while JSON is more compact and results in smaller payloads.

Landscape of API Traffic

Since we have started supporting gRPC (September 2020), we have seen a steady increase in gRPC traffic and many customers we speak with are in the planning stages of migrating from JSON to gRPC, or designing translation layers at the edge from external JSON callers to internal gRPC services.

Source of API traffic

We can look at the HTTP request headers to better understand the origin and intended use of the API. The User-Agent header allows us to identify what type of client made the call, and we can divide it into three broader groups: “browser”, “non-browser” and “unknown” (which indicates that the User-Agent header was not set).

About 38% of API calls are made by browsers as part of a web application built on top of backend APIs. Here, the browser loads an HTML page and populates dynamic fields by generating AJAX API calls against the backend service. This paradigm has become the de-facto standard as it provides an effective way to build dynamic yet flexible Web applications.

The next 56% comes from non-browsers, including mobile apps and IoT devices with a long tail of different types (wearables, connected sport equipment, gaming platforms and more). Finally, approximately 6% are “unknown” and since well-behaving browsers and tools like curl send a User-Agent by default, one could attribute much of this unknown to programmatic or automated tools, some of which could be malicious.

Landscape of API Traffic

Encryption

A key aspect of securing APIs against snooping and tampering is encrypting the session. Clients use SSL/TLS to authenticate the server they are connecting with, for example, by making sure it is truly their cryptocurrency vendor. The benefit of transport layer encryption is that after handshaking, all application protocol bytes are encrypted, providing both confidentiality and integrity assurances.

Cloudflare launched the latest version of TLS (v1.3) in September 2016, and it was enabled by default on some properties in May 2018. When looking at API traffic today, TLS v1.3 is the most adopted protocol with 55.9% of traffic using it. The vulnerable v1.0  and v1.1 were deprecated in March 2021 and their use has virtually disappeared.

Transport security protocol December 2021
TLS 1.3 55.9%
TLS 1.2 32.7%
QUIC 8.4%
None 2.8%
TLS 1.0 0.3%

The protocol that is growing fastest is QUIC. While QUIC can be used to carry many types of application protocols, Cloudflare has so far focused on HTTP/3, the mapping of HTTP over IETF QUIC. We started supporting draft versions of QUIC in 2018 and when QUIC version 1 was published as RFC 9000 in May 2021, we enabled it for everyone the next day. QUIC uses the TLS 1.3 handshake but has its own mechanism for protecting and securing packets. Looking at HTTP-based API traffic, we see HTTP/3 going from less than 3% in early February 2021 to more than 8% in December 2021. This growth broadly aligns RFC 9000 being published and during the periodHTTP/3 support being stabilized and enabled in a range of client implementations.

Mutual TLS, which is often used for mobile or IoT devices, accounts for 0.3% of total API traffic. Since we released the first version of mTLS in 2017 we’ve seen a growing number of inquiries from users across all Cloudflare plans, as we have recently made it easier for customers to start using mTLS with Cloudflare API Shield. Customers can now use Cloudflare dashboard to issue and manage certificates with one-click avoiding all the complexity of having to manage a Private Key Infrastructure and root certificates themselves.

Finally, unencrypted traffic can provide a great opportunity for attackers to access plain communications. The total unencrypted API traffic dropped from 4.6% of total requests in early 2021 to 2.6% in December 2021. This represents a significant step forward in establishing basic security for all API connections.

Security

Given the huge amount of traffic that Cloudflare handles every second, we can look for trends in blocked traffic and identify common patterns in threats or attacks.

When looking at the Cloudflare security systems, an HTML request is twice as likely to be blocked than an API request. Successful response codes (200, 201, 301 and 302) account for 91% of HTML and 97% of API requests, while 4XX error codes (like 400, 403, 404) are generated for 2.8% of API calls as opposed to 7% of HTML. Calls returning 5XXs codes (such as Internal Server Error, Bad Gateway, Service Unavailable) are almost nonexistent for APIs (less than 0.2% of calls) while are almost 2% of requests for HTML.

The relatively larger volume of unmitigated API requests can be explained by the automated nature of APIs, for example more API calls are generated in order to render a page that would require a single HTML request. Malicious or malformed requests are therefore diluted in a larger volume of calls generated by well-behaving automated systems.

Landscape of API Traffic

We can further analyse the frequency of specific error codes to get a sense of what the most frequent malformed (and possibly malicious) requests are. In the following figure, we plot the share of a particular error code when compared to all 4XXs.

Landscape of API Traffic

We can identify three groups of issues all equally likely (excluding the more obvious “404 Not Found” case): “400 Bad Request” (like malformed, invalid request), “429 Too Many Requests” (“Rate Limiting”), and the combination of Authentication and Authorization issues (“403 Forbidden” and “401 Unauthorized”). Those codes are followed by a long tail of other errors, including “422 Unprocessable Entity”, “409 Conflict”, and “402 Payment Required”.

This analysis confirms that the most common attacks rely on sending non-compliant requests, brute force efforts (24% of generated 4XXs are related to rate limiting), and accessing resources with invalid authentication or permission.

We can further analyse the reason why calls were blocked (especially relative to the 400s codes) by looking at what triggered the Cloudflare WAF. The OWASP and the Cloudflare Managed Ruleset are tools that scan incoming traffic looking for fingerprints of known vulnerabilities (such as SQLi, XSS, etc.) and they can provide context on what attack was detected.

A portion of the blocked traffic has triggered a managed rule for which we can identify the threat category. Although a malicious request can match multiple categories, the WAF assigns it to the first threat that is identified. User-Agent anomaly is the most common reason why traffic is blocked. This is usually triggered by the lack of or by a malformed User-Agent header, capturing requests that do not provide enough credible information on what type of client has sent the request. The next most common threat is cross-site scripting. After these two categories, there is a long tail of other anomalies that were identified.

Landscape of API Traffic

Conclusions

More than one out of two requests we process is an API call, and industries such as Banking, Retail and Financial Services are leading in terms of adoption and growth.

Furthermore, API calls are growing twice as fast as HTML traffic, making it an ideal candidate for new security solutions aimed at protecting customer data.

Burkina Faso experiencing second major Internet disruption this year

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/internet-disruption-in-burkina-faso/

Burkina Faso experiencing second major Internet disruption this year

The early hours of Sunday, January 23, 2022, started in Burkina Faso with an Internet outage or shutdown. Heavy gunfire in an army mutiny could be related to the outage according to the New York Times (“mobile Internet services were shut down”). As of today, there are three countries affected by major Internet disruptions — Tonga and Yemen are the others.

Cloudflare Radar shows that Internet traffic dropped significantly in the West African country after ~09:15 UTC (the same in local time) and remains low more than 24 hours later. Burkina Faso also had a mobile Internet shutdown on January 10, 2022, and another we reported in late November 2021.

Burkina Faso experiencing second major Internet disruption this year
Burkina Faso experiencing second major Internet disruption this year

The main ISPs from Burkina Faso were affected. The two leading Internet Service Providers Orange and FasoNet lost Internet traffic after 09:15 UTC, but also Telecel Faso, as the next chart shows. This morning, at around 10:00 UTC there was some traffic from FasoNet but less than half of what we saw at the same time in preceding days.

Burkina Faso experiencing second major Internet disruption this year

It’s not only mobile traffic that is affected. Desktop traffic is also impacted. In Burkina Faso, our data shows that mobile devices normally represent 70% of Internet traffic.

Burkina Faso experiencing second major Internet disruption this year

With the Burkina Faso disruption, three countries are currently mostly without access to the Internet for different reasons.

In Yemen, as we reported, the four day-long outage is related to airstrikes that affected a telecommunications building in Al-Hudaydah where the FALCON undersea cable lands.

Burkina Faso experiencing second major Internet disruption this year

In Tonga, the nine day-long outage that we also explained is related to problems in the undersea cable caused by the large volcanic eruption in the South Pacific archipelago.

Burkina Faso experiencing second major Internet disruption this year

Several significant Internet disruptions have already occurred in 2022 for different reasons:

1. An Internet outage that lasted a few hours in The Gambia because of a cable problem (on January 4).
2. A six days Internet shutdown in Kazakhstan because of unrest (from January 5 to January 11).
3. A mobile Internet shutdown in Burkina Faso because of a coup plot (on January 10).
4. An Internet outage in Tonga because of a volcanic eruption (ongoing since January 15).
5. An Internet outage in Yemen because of airstrikes that affected a telecommunications building (ongoing since January 20,).
6. This second Internet disruption in Burkina Faso is related to military unrest (ongoing since January 23).

You can keep an eye on Cloudflare Radar to monitor the Burkina Faso, Yemen and Tonga situations as they unfold.

Internet outage in Yemen amid airstrikes

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/internet-outage-in-yemen-amid-airstrikes/

Internet outage in Yemen amid airstrikes

The early hours of Friday, January 21, 2022, started in Yemen with a country-wide Internet outage. According to local and global news reports airstrikes are happening in the country and the outage is likely related as there are reports that a telecommunications building in Al-Hudaydah where the FALCON undersea cable lands.

Cloudflare Radar shows that Internet traffic dropped close to zero between 21:30 UTC (January 20, 2022) and by 22:00 UTC (01:00 in local time).

Internet outage in Yemen amid airstrikes

The outage affected the main state-owned ISP, Public Telecommunication Corporation (AS30873 in blue in the next chart), which represents almost all the Internet traffic in the country.

Internet outage in Yemen amid airstrikes

Looking at BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) updates from Yemen’s ASNs around the time of the outage, we see a clear spike at the same time the main ASN was affected ~21:55 UTC, January 20, 2022. These update messages are BGP signalling that Yemen’s main ASN was no longer routable, something similar to what we saw happening in The Gambia and Kazakhstan but for very different reasons.

Internet outage in Yemen amid airstrikes

So far, 2022 has started with a few significant Internet disruptions for different reasons:

1. An Internet outage in The Gambia because of a cable problem.
2. An Internet shutdown in Kazakhstan because of unrest.
3. A mobile Internet shutdown in Burkina Faso because of a coup plot.
4. An Internet outage in Tonga because of a volcanic eruption (still ongoing).

You can keep an eye on Cloudflare Radar to monitor this situation as it unfolds.

Tonga’s likely lengthy Internet outage

Post Syndicated from João Tomé original https://blog.cloudflare.com/tonga-internet-outage/

Tonga’s likely lengthy Internet outage

2022 only has 19 days of existence but so far this January, there have already been four significant Internet disruptions:

1. An Internet outage in The Gambia because of a cable problem.
2. An Internet shutdown in Kazakhstan because of unrest.
3. A mobile Internet shutdown in Burkina Faso because of a coup plot.
4. An Internet outage in Tonga because of a volcanic eruption.

The latest Internet outage, in the South Pacific country of Tonga (with 169 islands), is still ongoing. It started with the large eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, an uninhabited volcanic island of the Tongan archipelago on Friday, January 14, 2022. The next day, Cloudflare Radar shows that the Internet outage started at around 03:00 UTC (16:00 local time) — Saturday, January 15, 2022 — and is ongoing for more than four days. Tonga’s 105,000 residents are almost entirely unreachable, according to the BBC.

Tonga’s likely lengthy Internet outage

When we focus on the number of requests by ASN, the country’s main ISPs Digicel and Kalianet started to lose traffic after 03:00 UTC and by 05:30 UTC January 15, 2022, Cloudflare saw close to no traffic at all from them, as shown in the graph below.

Tonga’s likely lengthy Internet outage

Looking at the BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) updates from Tonga’s ASNs around the time of the outage, we see a clear spike at 05:35 UTC (18:35 local time). These update messages are BGP signalling that the Tongan ASNs are no longer routable. We saw the same trend in The Gambia outage of January 4, 2022 — there you can read about the importance of BGP as a mechanism to exchange routing information between autonomous systems on the Internet, something that was also seen in the 2021 Facebook outage.

Tonga’s likely lengthy Internet outage
BGP updates from Tongan ASNs around the time of the outage.

Cloudflare Radar data doesn’t show any significant disruptions for Internet traffic in Tonga’s neighbours American Samoa (although there was a small decrease in traffic on Friday and Saturday, January 14 and 15, 2022 in comparison with the previous week) and Fiji. In American Samoa, all schools were closed on Friday, January 14, because of severe weather, and on the same day, after the volcanic eruption, there were tsunami warnings and evacuation to higher ground was advised (that continued through the weekend).

Tonga, as a geographically remote Polynesian country more than 800 km from the Fiji archipelago, is highly dependent on the Internet for communications. That is something that was improved five years ago with an infrastructure connectivity program from the World Bank. Prior to that, the country was dependent on satellite links for Internet that included a very small percentage of the population.

Repairs could take a few weeks

Southern Cross Cable Network confirmed that the 827 km fiber-optic undersea communications cable connecting Tonga to the outside world may have been broken. The company is assisting Tonga Cable Limited (TCL), which owns the single cable that provides Internet access and almost all communications to and from the archipelago.

The eruption resulted in a fault in the international cable 37 kilometres from Nukuʻalofa (Tonga’s capital), and a further fault in a domestic cable 47 km from the capital.

TCL announced that it has already met with the US cable company SubCom to start preparations for SubCom’s cable repair ship Reliance to be dispatched from Papua New Guinea to Tonga, possibly via Samoa (more than 4,000 km away).

The repairs could take “at least” four weeks, given that a repair to a fiber-optic cable that has been cut on the seabed is considered more complicated than misconfigurations, power outages or other types of infrastructure damage. “The site conditions in Tonga have to be assessed thoroughly because of volcanic activities,” according to TCL chairman Samiuela Fonua.

Fonua also mentioned that the last cable cut (back in 2019) took nearly two weeks to repair, but this time the site conditions will determine the time it will take — the two cables are not far away from the eruption site (the volcano is still active). According to ZDNet, in 2019 Tonga signed a 15-year deal with Kacific for satellite connectivity, but since then the satellite provider says it is waiting on the Tongan government to activate its contract.

Svalbard Undersea Cable System also disrupted in January

Also in January, Space Norway, the operator of the world’s most northern submarine cable — the Svalbard Undersea Cable System — announced that on January 7 it located a disruption in one of the two twin submarine fiber optic communication cables connecting Longyearbyen with Andøya north of Harstad in northern Norway (in the area where the seabed goes from 300 meters down to 2,700 meters in the Greenland Sea). A repair mission is being planned.

A world of undersea cables for the world’s communications

A significant amount of Internet traffic is carried by a complex network of undersea fiber-optic cables that connect countries and continents. The full submarine cable system (the first communications cables laid were from the 1850s and carried telegraphy traffic) is what makes most of the world’s Internet function between countries and continents. There are 428 active submarine cables (36 are planned), running in an estimate of 1.3 million km around the globe.

Tonga’s likely lengthy Internet outage
World map of submarine cables. Antarctica is the only continent not yet reached by a submarine telecommunications cable. Source: TeleGeography (www.submarinecablemap.com)

This gives a sense that the Internet is literally a network of networks in a world where estimates indicate that around 99% of the data traffic that is crossing oceans is carried by these undersea cables (satellite Internet, so far, is still residual — SpaceX has around 145,000 users).

The reliability of submarine cables is high, especially when multiple paths are available in the event of a cable break. That’s not the case for the Tonga outage, given that the 827 km submarine cable only connects Fiji to the Tonga archipelago — Fiji is connected to the main Southern Cross Cable, as the next image illustrates.

Tonga’s likely lengthy Internet outage
Submarine Cable Map shows the undersea cables that connect Australia to Fiji and the following connections to other archipelagos like Tonga. Source: TeleGeography (www.submarinecablemap.com) 


The total carrying capacity of submarine cables is enormous (EllaLink, the optical submarine cable linking the European and South American continents, for example, has 100 Tbps capacity) and grows year after year as the world gets more and more connected. For example, Google has recently finished a new cable with 350 Tbps of capacity. But, a transoceanic submarine cable system costs several hundred million dollars to construct. One of the latest, between Portugal and Egypt, with a total of 8,700 kilometers, is budgeted at 326 million euros.

The Tonga outage was not the only one of 2022 (so far) that happened because of cable problems. The Gambia outage that affected the country’s main ISP, Gamtel, was because of “a primary link failure at ACE”, the cable system that serves 24 countries, from Europe to Africa, namely in the points of cable connections from Senegal to The Gambia.

In spite of these two fiber cable problems being separated by a few days at the start of 2022, Internet outages are more common because of situations like misconfigurations, power outages, extreme weather or the frequent state-imposed shutdowns to deal with unrest, elections or exams — recently this was the case of Sudan or Kazakhstan.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Post Syndicated from Omer Yoachimik original https://blog.cloudflare.com/ddos-attack-trends-for-2021-q4/

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

This post is also available in 日本語, Deutsch, Français, Español.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

The first half of 2021 witnessed massive ransomware and ransom DDoS attack campaigns that interrupted aspects of critical infrastructure around the world (including one of the largest petroleum pipeline system operators in the US) and a vulnerability in IT management software that targeted schools, public sector, travel organizations, and credit unions, to name a few.

The second half of the year recorded a growing swarm of one of the most powerful botnets deployed (Meris) and record-breaking HTTP DDoS attacks and network-layer attacks observed over the Cloudflare network. This besides the Log4j2 vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) discovered in December that allows an attacker to execute code on a remote server — arguably one of the most severe vulnerabilities on the Internet since both Heartbleed and Shellshock.

Prominent attacks such as the ones listed above are but a few examples that demonstrate a trend of intensifying cyber-insecurity that affected everyone, from tech firms and government organizations to wineries and meat processing plants.

Here are some DDoS attack trends and highlights from 2021 and Q4 ‘21 specifically:

Ransom DDoS attacks

  • In Q4, ransom DDoS attacks increased by 29% YoY and 175% QoQ.
  • In December alone, one out of every three survey respondents reported being targeted by a ransom DDoS attack or threatened by the attacker.

Application-layer DDoS attacks

  • The Manufacturing industry was the most attacked in Q4 ’21, recording a whopping 641% increase QoQ in the number of attacks. The Business Services and Gaming/Gambling industries were the second and third most targeted industries by application-layer DDoS attacks.
  • For the fourth time in a row this year, China topped the charts with the highest percentage of attack traffic originating from its networks.
  • A new botnet called the Meris botnet emerged in mid-2021 and continued to bombard organizations around the world, launching some of the largest HTTP attacks on record — including a 17.2M rps attack that Cloudflare automatically mitigated.

Network-layer DDoS attacks

  • Q4 ’21 was the busiest quarter for attackers in 2021. In December 2021 alone, there were more than all the attacks observed in Q1 and Q2 ’21 separately.
  • While the majority of attacks were small, terabit-strong attacks became the new norm in the second half of 2021. Cloudflare automatically mitigated dozens of attacks peaking over 1 Tbps, with the largest one peaking just under 2 Tbps — the largest we’ve ever seen.
  • Q4 ’21, and November specifically, recorded a persistent ransom DDoS campaign against VoIP providers around the world.
  • Attacks originating from Moldova quadrupled in Q4 ’21 QoQ, making it the country with the highest percentage of network-layer DDoS activity.
  • SYN floods and UDP floods were the most frequent attack vectors while emerging threats such as SNMP attacks increased by nearly 5,800% QoQ.

This report is based on DDoS attacks that were automatically detected and mitigated by Cloudflare’s DDoS Protection systems. To learn more about how it works, check out this deep-dive blog post.

A note on how we measure DDoS attacks observed over our network

To analyze attack trends, we calculate the “DDoS activity” rate, which is the percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic (attack + clean) observed over our global network. Measuring attack numbers as a percentage of the total traffic observed allows us to normalize data points and avoid biases reflected in absolute numbers towards, for example, a Cloudflare data center that receives more total traffic and likely, also more attacks.

An interactive version of this report is available on Cloudflare Radar.

Ransom Attacks

Our systems constantly analyze traffic and automatically apply mitigation when DDoS attacks are detected. Each DDoS’d customer is prompted with an automated survey to help us better understand the nature of the attack and the success of the mitigation.

For over two years now, Cloudflare has been surveying attacked customers — one question on the survey being if they received a ransom note demanding payment in exchange to stop the DDoS attack. Q4 ’21 recorded the highest survey responses ever that indicated ransom threats — ransom attacks increased by 29% YoY and 175% QoQ. More specifically, one out of every 4.5 respondents (22%) reported receiving a ransom letter demanding payment by the attacker.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021
The percentage of respondents reported being targeted by a ransom DDoS attack or that have received threats in advance of the attack.

When we break it down by month, we can see that December 2021 topped the charts with 32% of respondents reporting receiving a ransom letter — that’s nearly one out of every three surveyed respondents.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Application-layer DDoS attacks

Application-layer DDoS attacks, specifically HTTP DDoS attacks, are attacks that usually aim to disrupt a web server by making it unable to process legitimate user requests. If a server is bombarded with more requests than it can process, the server will drop legitimate requests and — in some cases — crash, resulting in degraded performance or an outage for legitimate users.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Application-layer DDoS attacks by industry

In Q4, DDoS attacks on Manufacturing companies increased by 641% QoQ, and DDoS attacks on the Business Services industry increased by 97%.

When we break down the application-layer attacks targeted by industry, the Manufacturing, Business Services, and Gaming/Gambling industries were the most targeted industries in Q4 ’21.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Application-layer DDoS attacks by source country

To understand the origin of the HTTP attacks, we look at the geolocation of the source IP address belonging to the client that generated the attack HTTP requests. Unlike network-layer attacks, source IP addresses cannot be spoofed in HTTP attacks. A high percentage of DDoS activity in a given country usually indicates the presence of botnets operating from within the country’s borders.

For the fourth quarter in a row, China remains the country with the highest percentage of DDoS attacks originating from within its borders. More than three out of every thousand HTTP requests that originated from Chinese IP addresses were part of an HTTP DDoS attack. The US remained in second place, followed by Brazil and India.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Application-layer DDoS attacks by target country

In order to identify which countries are targeted by the most HTTP DDoS attacks, we bucket the DDoS attacks by our customers’ billing countries and represent it as a percentage out of all DDoS attacks.

For the third consecutive time this year, organizations in the United States were targeted by the most HTTP DDoS attacks, followed by Canada and Germany.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Network-layer DDoS attacks

While application-layer attacks target the application (Layer 7 of the OSI model) running the service that end users are trying to access, network-layer attacks aim to overwhelm network infrastructure (such as in-line routers and servers) and the Internet link itself.

Cloudflare thwarts an almost 2 Tbps attack

In November, our systems automatically detected and mitigated an almost 2 Tbps DDoS attack. This was a multi-vector attack combining DNS amplification attacks and UDP floods. The entire attack lasted just one minute. The attack was launched from approximately 15,000 bots running a variant of the original Mirai code on IoT devices and unpatched GitLab instances.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Network-layer DDoS attacks by month

December was the busiest month for attackers in 2021.

Q4 ‘21 was the busiest quarter in 2021 for attackers. Over 43% of all network-layer DDoS attacks took place in the fourth quarter of 2021. While October was a relatively calmer month, in November, the month of the Chinese Singles’ Day, the American Thanksgiving holiday, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, the number of network-layer DDoS attacks nearly doubled. The number of observed attacks increased towards the final days of December ’21 as the world prepared to close out the year. In fact, the total number of attacks in December alone was higher than all the attacks in Q2 ’21 and almost equivalent to all attacks in Q1 ’21.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Network-layer DDoS attacks by attack rate

While most attacks are still relatively ‘small’ in size, terabit-strong attacks are becoming the norm.

There are different ways of measuring the size of an L3/4 DDoS attack. One is the volume of traffic it delivers, measured as the bit rate (specifically, terabits per second or gigabits per second). Another is the number of packets it delivers, measured as the packet rate (specifically, millions of packets per second).

Attacks with high bit rates attempt to cause a denial-of-service event by clogging the Internet link, while attacks with high packet rates attempt to overwhelm the servers, routers, or other in-line hardware appliances. These devices dedicate a certain amount of memory and computation power to process each packet. Therefore, by bombarding it with many packets, the appliance can be left with no further processing resources. In such a case, packets are “dropped,” i.e., the appliance is unable to process them. For users, this results in service disruptions and denial of service.

The distribution of attacks by their size (in bit rate) and month is shown below. As seen in the graph above, the majority of attacks took place in December. However, the graph below illustrates that larger attacks, over 300 Gbps in size, took place in November. Most of the attacks between 5-20 Gbps took place in December.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Distribution by packet rate

An interesting correlation Cloudflare has observed is that when the number of attacks increases, their size and duration decrease. In the first two-thirds of 2021, the number of attacks was relatively small, and correspondingly, their rates increased, e.g., in Q3 ’21, attacks ranging from 1-10 million packets per second (mpps) increased by 196%. In Q4 ’21, the number of attacks increased and Cloudflare observed a decrease in the size of attacks. 91% of all attacks peaked below 50,000 packets per second (pps) — easily sufficient to take down unprotected Internet properties.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Larger attacks of over 1 mpps decreased by 48% to 28% QoQ, while attacks peaking below 50K pps increased by 2.36% QoQ.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Distribution by bit rate

Similar to the trend observed in packet-intensive attacks, the amount of bit-intensive attacks shrunk as well. While attacks over 1 Tbps are becoming the norm, with the largest one we’ve ever seen peak just below 2 Tbps, the majority of attacks are still small and peaked below 500 Mbps (97.2%).

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

In Q4 ’21, larger attacks of all ranges above 500 Mbps saw massive decreases ranging from 35% to 57% for the larger 100+ Gbps attacks.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Network-layer DDoS attacks by duration

Most attacks remain under one hour in duration, reiterating the need for automated always-on DDoS mitigation solutions.

We measure the duration of an attack by recording the difference between when it is first detected by our systems as an attack and the last packet we see with that attack signature towards that specific target. In the last quarter of 2021, 98% of all network-layer attacks lasted less than one hour. This is very common as most of the attacks are short-lived. Even more so, a trend we’ve seen is that when the number of attacks increases, as in this quarter, their rate and duration decreases.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Short attacks can easily go undetected, especially burst attacks that, within seconds, bombard a target with a significant number of packets, bytes, or requests. In this case, DDoS protection services that rely on manual mitigation by security analysis have no chance in mitigating the attack in time. They can only learn from it in their post-attack analysis, then deploy a new rule that filters the attack fingerprint and hope to catch it next time. Similarly, using an “on-demand” service, where the security team will redirect traffic to a DDoS provider during the attack, is also inefficient because the attack will already be over before the traffic routes to the on-demand DDoS provider.

It’s recommended that companies use automated, always-on DDoS protection services that analyze traffic and apply real-time fingerprinting fast enough to block short-lived attacks.

Attack vectors

SYN floods remain attackers’ favorite method of attack, while attacks over SNMP saw a massive surge of almost 5,800% QoQ.

An attack vector is a term used to describe the method that the attacker uses to launch their DDoS attack, i.e., the IP protocol, packet attributes such as TCP flags, flooding method, and other criteria.

For the first time in 2021, the percentage of SYN flood attacks significantly decreased. Throughout 2021, SYN floods accounted for 54% of all network-layer attacks on average. While still grabbing first place as the most frequent vector, its share dropped by 38% QoQ to 34%.

However, it was a close-run for SYN attacks and UDP attacks. A UDP flood is a type of denial-of-service attack in which a large number of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets are sent to a targeted server with the aim of overwhelming that device’s ability to process and respond. Oftentimes, the firewall protecting the targeted server can also become exhausted as a result of UDP flooding, resulting in a denial-of-service to legitimate traffic. Attacks over UDP jumped from fourth place in Q3 ’21 to second place in Q4 ’21, with a share of 32% of all network-layer attacks — a 1,198% increase in QoQ.

In third place came the SNMP underdog that made a massive leap with its first time 2021 appearance in the top attack vectors.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Emerging threats

When we look at emerging attack vectors — which helps us understand what new vectors attackers are deploying to launch attacks — we observe a massive spike in SNMP, MSSQL, and generic UDP-based DDoS attacks.

Both SNMP and MSSQL attacks are used to reflect and amplify traffic on the target by spoofing the target’s IP address as the source IP in the packets used to trigger the attack.

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a UDP-based protocol that is often used to discover and manage network devices such as printers, switches, routers, and firewalls of a home or enterprise network on UDP well-known port 161. In an SNMP reflection attack, the attacker sends out a large number of SNMP queries while spoofing the source IP address in the packet as the targets to devices on the network that, in turn, reply to that target’s address. Numerous responses from the devices on the network results in the target network being DDoSed.

Similar to the SNMP amplification attack, the Microsoft SQL (MSSQL) attack is based on a technique that abuses the Microsoft SQL Server Resolution Protocol for the purpose of launching a reflection-based DDoS attack. The attack occurs when a Microsoft SQL Server responds to a client query or request, attempting to exploit the Microsoft SQL Server Resolution Protocol (MC-SQLR), listening on UDP port 1434.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

Network-layer DDoS attacks by country

Attacks originating from Moldova quadrupled, making it the country with the highest percentage of network-layer DDoS activity.

When analyzing network-layer DDoS attacks, we bucket the traffic by the Cloudflare edge data center locations where the traffic was ingested, and not by the source IP. The reason for this is that, when attackers launch network-layer attacks, they can spoof the source IP address in order to obfuscate the attack source and introduce randomness into the attack properties, which can make it harder for simple DDoS protection systems to block the attack. Hence, if we were to derive the source country based on a spoofed source IP, we would get a spoofed country.

Cloudflare is able to overcome the challenges of spoofed IPs by displaying the attack data by the location of the Cloudflare data center in which the attack was observed. We are able to achieve geographical accuracy in our report because we have data centers in over 250 cities around the world.

DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021
DDoS Attack Trends for Q4 2021

To view all regions and countries, check out the interactive map.

Summary

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. A better Internet is one that is more secure, faster, and reliable for everyone — even in the face of DDoS attacks. As part of our mission, since 2017, we’ve been providing unmetered and unlimited DDoS protection for free to all of our customers. Over the years, it has become increasingly easier for attackers to launch DDoS attacks. To counter the attacker’s advantage, we want to make sure that it is also easy and free for organizations of all sizes to protect themselves against DDoS attacks of all types.

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