A typo is one of those common mistakes with unpredictable results when it comes to the Internet’s domain names (DNS). In this blog post we’re going to analyze traffic for exmaple.com, and see how a very simple human error ends up creating unintentional traffic on the Internet.
Cloudflare has owned exmaple.com for a few years now, but don’t confuse it with example.com! example.com is a reserved domain name set by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), under the direction of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It has been used since 1999 as a placeholder, or example, in documentation, tutorials, sample network configurations, or to prevent accidental references to real websites. We use it extensively on this blog.
As I’m writing it, the autocorrect system transforms exmaple.com into example.com, every time, assuming I must have misspelled it. But in situations where there’s no automatic spelling correction (for example, while editing a configuration file) it’s easy for example to become exmaple.
And so, lots of traffic goes to exmaple.com by mistake — whether it was a typoed attempt to reach example.com or due to other random reasons. Fake email accounts in marketing forms are among these reasons (more details below). This phenomenon of "typosquatting" is used by attackers hoping someone misspells the name of a known brand, as we saw in March in our blog “Top 50 most impersonated brands in phishing attacks and new tools you can use to protect your employees from them”. Random typos that cause networks (big or small) problems have also been around for a while.
Here is what the example.com web page shows to a user who goes directly to that domain name:
And this is what exmaple.com looks like:
A bit of exmaple.com history
exmaple.com came to us a few years ago from a customer. He registered the domain to prevent malicious exploitation, but got tired of dealing with more traffic than expected — it’s not the first time that this has happened (icanhazip.com was another similar example). Too much traffic does come at a financial cost. So, why would a domain name like exmaple.com, that is not promoted anywhere, have traffic? It shows how unintentional traffic is a real thing with the right domain name. It could also be a result of a typo in network configurations or a misconfigured router, as we’re going to see next.
Let’s explore, then, what traffic goes to exmaple.com by answering some questions.
How much traffic does it get?
It gets much more traffic than one would expect in terms of HTTP requests, given that it is mostly used because someone or a system/router set by someone, misspelled example.com. In terms of bytes, the numbers are minimal, as this is a very simple site with only a short text sentence, as shown above. Usually, on a daily basis, it doesn’t go over 1 Mbps. In a 12-month period (May 2022-June 2023), it had 2.48 billion HTTP requests, but it has been increasing over recent months. In April 2023, it was 243 million requests, an 8.13 million daily average, against a 6.07 million daily average in June 2022.
What type of traffic is it? Almost all HTTP traffic that goes to exmaple.com is categorized as bot-related. That’s around 99.99%: 2.48 billion requests were from bots, 110,000 were not from bots, and 40,000 we weren’t able to categorize. This already gives us some information, showing that the majority of traffic is not a typical user simply adding exmaple.com by mistake to some documentation or tutorial. This is mostly automated traffic (more on that below).
There are also a few peaks worth mentioning. There’s a clear spike in bot traffic on December 8 and 9, 2022 (11.8 and 11.85 million requests, respectively), the week after Cyber Monday week.
From which countries are requests coming from? The top countries include France, Japan, Germany, and the US. Below, we’re going to check why this happens by looking at the autonomous system (ASNs) perspective. Never forgetting that connected networks or AS’s make up the Internet.
How about HTTP protocols?
In terms of the HTTP protocols, the majority uses unencrypted HTTP only, accounting for 76% of all requests, while HTTPS represents 24%. That is actually unusual in the modern day Internet. As Cloudflare Radar data shows, excluding bots, HTTPS represents 99.3% of all requests in a general Cloudflare perspective, and its 80.8% of HTTPS for bots-only traffic. HTTPS adds a layer of security (SSL/TLS encryption), ensuring data remains confidential.
HTTP is definitely more used by automated traffic, given that HTTPS is more used for human consumption, as browsers tend to prioritize HTTPS. Only 6% of human-related requests use HTTP (the rest is HTTPS). That HTTP percentage jumps to 76%, when considering automated requests-only.
Is exmaple.com the target of cyber attacks?
The short answer is yes. But it’s a very low percentage of requests that are mitigated. The biggest spike in application layer attacks was on December 9, 2022, with 560k HTTP daily requests categorized as DDoS attacks. Nothing of large scale, but that said, small attacks can also take down under-protected sites. WAF mitigations had a 10k spike on November 2, 2022.
Generating the most traffic: a French ISP
What drives most of the traffic are very specific ASNs. In this case, the dominant one is one of France's main Internet operators, Bouygues Telecom. Its AS5410 is generating the most traffic to exmaple.com, followed by Google Cloud, in Japan. Bouygues Telecom traffic to exmaple.com means more than three million daily requests at least since February 2023. Here’s the AS5410 over time traffic:
We contacted Bouygues Telecom to let them know a couple of weeks ago, and shared information about where we were seeing traffic from. So far, they haven’t found the needle in the haystack sending traffic to exmaple.com, potentially related to some erroneous configuration.
And since, exmaple.com is not a malicious site, so there’s no harm, no foul. However, one could wonder what might happen if this were a malicious domain. Identifying and resolving misconfigurations is important for network administrators to ensure efficient and secure network operations.
There are a few other ASN-related oddities. A major spike in traffic on December 8, 2022, with 5.84 million HTTP requests on a single day, came from the Netherlands-based AS49981, Worldstream (an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider). And on March 28-29, 2023, it was Russian Rostelecom AS12389, with a double spike of around 1.8 million requests per day. On June 18, 2022, it was German Deutsche Telekom AS3320, and on May 6, 2022, there was a 2.31 million HTTP requests daily spike from Bell Canada’s ISP, AS577, just to mention those with clearer spikes.
Here is the list that associates countries with the ASNs that are generating more traffic to exmaple.com:
Why does this happen in specific ASNs in different regions of the world, you may ask? Even without a definitive answer, the amount of daily traffic from those ASNs, and the prevalence of bot traffic, seems to indicate that most traffic is related to a possible misconfiguration in a router, software or network setting, intended to go to example.com.
As we observed previously, example.com is used for testing, educational, or illustrative purposes, including in routers from specific networks. It could be for network troubleshooting and testing, training, simulations, or it also could be in the documentation or guides for configuring routers, as examples to illustrate how to set up DNS configurations, route advertisement, or other networking settings.
What are the main IP versions and browsers?
Regarding IP versions, they can be IPv4 or IPv6 — v6 emerged as a solution when the initial v4 wasn't prepared for the Internet's growth. For exmaple.com unique visitors, looking at the daily number of unique IPs where requests originate, IPv6 has been rising in comparison to IPv4. This suggests that IPv6 is now more frequently used by the services and bots generating most of this traffic. It started in May at 30% IPv6 usage and is now around 50%.
The user-agent header sent by the visitor's web browser in the HTTP request typically contains information about the used browser, operating system, and sometimes even the device. But in this case, the user-agent information doesn’t give us much detail, even of there’s some odd ones. “Empty” (when user agents are absent) comes first, followed by “Mozilla/5.0” and “Go-http-client/2.0”. What do those user-agents mean?
The user agent string "Mozilla/5.0" is widely used by a variety of web browsers, both mainstream and niche, including Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera. Therefore, it is challenging to attribute the usage of "Mozilla/5.0" specifically to a single browser or user category. While "Mozilla/5.0" is associated with legitimate browsers, it's worth noting that user agent strings can be easily manipulated or forged by bots and malicious actors.
“Go-http-client/2.0” indicates that the request is coming from a program or application written in the Go programming language (often referred to as Golang).
There are also a few others represented with known meanings, such as “curl/7.66.0” (the numbers correspond to the specific version being used). This user agent string indicates that the HTTP request was made using the cURL command-line tool, a popular tool used for tasks like downloading files, automated testing, debugging, or server monitoring. There’s also “Lavf/59.27.100”, a less common user agent tied to FFmpeg's Lavf library for multimedia tasks, and “python-requests/2.28.1”, that indicates the use of the Python Requests library, popular for sending HTTP requests and interacting with web services.
In the camp of more unusual user agents, with a few thousand requests, are instances like a specific GitHub page (a software library called Typhoeus) or a possible “script for checking if job exists” for the job searching site vercida.com.
From where did the users access the website? Let's examine the distribution of HTTP referrers. Note that the term "referer" is based on a misspelling in the original specification that has persisted (it should be "referrer header" instead) in HTTP — in the original HTTP proposal Tim Berners-Lee spells it “referrer” as well. The referer or referrer header is an optional field that provides information about the URL of the web page from which a particular request originated.
The predominant “referer” used is “empty”, which occurs when a user agent isn’t provided, also possibly meaning direct access or by bookmark. Next is exmaple.com itself (an unusual pattern, given there are no links on exmaple.com), with a peak of 160,000 requests on February 6, 2023. Following that is a curious spike of 10,000 requests from "reddit.com" on January 30, 2023, possibly due to a misspelling of example.com in a Reddit post that got popular.
We didn’t find a specific Reddit post from January 30 mentioning exmaple.com, but there were a few there over the years, clearly aiming to show example.com. Some of those are as recent as one year or even 10 months, like this Reddit post on the AWS subreddit, or this one from January 31, 2023, related to SEO.
On that note, regarding human misuse of misconfigurations impacting the Internet, in 2018, a member of the Cloudflare team gave a presentation about “Internet Noise” during a RIPE event that can be consulted here. It’s about unwanted traffic due to misconfigurations and misuse of proxies and internal use situations.
How about exmaple.com email trends?
Although no email address online intentionally targets exmaple.com, that address still gets some email attention. We configured a Gmail account to monitor these random emails in early 2022. Within 16 months, the 15 GB email capacity was fully used, containing 216,000 emails — an average of 432 daily emails. These emails reflect various scenarios: some are marketing-related, others appear to be network tests, and some are from individuals who, by error or to avoid spam, ended up at “@exmaple.com”. Among these use cases, we noticed accounts linked to PlayStation, Apple devices, Pandora music, Facebook, and more.
What the exmaple.com Inbox typically looks like.
Examining a 30-day span of emails (late July to late August), we noticed that certain types of emails are more common than others. This is notably seen in tests conducted by computer software applications that monitor systems, networks, and infrastructure. The main example of this is Nagios.
Since late July, nearly 83% of almost 4,000 emails were from Nagios. The sender used a “local domain” from Nagios, and the email address was “[email protected]”—where example.com was likely the intended recipient. The subjects alternated between “PROBLEM Service Alert: [Name of company] ATM/PING is WARNING” and “RECOVERY Service Alert: [Name of company]_Backup/PING is OK”, indicating service tests.
Analyzing the regions where most emails originate (based on our data centers), it's evident that North America and Southeast Asia are the primary sources, along with Europe. Regarding languages, English dominates, but some emails are in German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Russian.
Microsoft (56 emails), Apple (30), and Google (20 emails) are in the mix. Surprisingly, emails from various golf courses (31 emails from eight different golf courses) were also present, along with emails from cruise ship companies. Additionally, there are emails from well-known brands such as Call of Duty, PlayStation, HP, Uber (related to Uber Eats), McAfee, and even the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (in newsletter subscription emails) that were observed (in this case, from the actual brands and not spam look alike). While Facebook-related emails were present in previous months, they haven't been seen recently.
Some emails clearly reveal their "fake" email intent, like “[email protected]”, sent by a virtual learning platform, likely when someone provided a randomly false email address. There are also repeated instances of people’s names like Mike or others, including surnames, before “@exmaple.com”. This suggests that people use the same fictitious email address when asked for their email by companies.
Here are some of the most creatively formed or interesting email addresses provided between July and August 2023, organized by us based on types of chosen email addresses (we included the number of emails in the most frequently used ones):
In the realm of email, DMARC (that stands for "Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance") is a security protocol that helps prevent email spoofing and phishing attacks by providing a framework. It is used by email senders to authenticate their messages and receivers to verify their authenticity. DMARC is based on both SPF (verifies if an email was sent by an authorized sender) and DKIM (the receiving server will check the DKIM-Signature header), and the domains used by those two protocols. So, DMARC requires that SPF or DKIM “pass”.
The implementation of DMARC signals that an email sender is taking measures to improve email security and protect their domain's reputation. With this context, let’s delve into DMARC validation. How did these random email senders to “@exmaple.com”? Only 11% (433) of all emails (3890) from the past 30 days passed the DMARC authentication successfully, most of those were from recognized senders like Apple, Uber, or Microsoft.
This is also because a significant 83% (3252) of emails originated from what appear to be tests conducted by computer software applications that monitor systems, networks, and infrastructure — specifically, Nagios. All of these emails are categorized as "none" in terms of DMARC policies, indicating that the sender is not using a DMARC policy. This approach is frequently adopted as an initial phase to gauge the impact of DMARC policies before adopting more robust measures. Just 1% of all emails "failed" DMARC authentication, implying that these emails didn't align with the sender's designated policies.
In such instances, domain owners can instruct email providers to take actions such as quarantining the email or outright rejection, thus shielding recipients from potentially malicious messages. This was evident in domains like amazon.co.jp or sanmateo.flester.com (where "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" messages originated from the Mail Delivery System).
Our email perspective could have been even more comprehensive if this “@exmaple.com” email account had Cloudflare Area 1 — our cloud-native email security service that detects and thwarts attacks before they reach user inboxes. Perhaps in a future geeky venture, we will also incorporate that viewpoint, complete with percentages for spam, malicious content, and threat categories.
Where is example.com on our domain popularity ranking? What about exmaple.com?
Last but not least, we also have insight into example.com itself. Looking at our most popular domains list (using data from our 1.1.1.1 resolver), example.com or “example.org” are no strangers to our popular domains ranking. Those two are usual “guests” of our top 500 domains ranking, both worldwide and in specific countries, which also is an expression of its popularity and usage for all the use cases we already discussed. example.com usually sits higher, in the top 300. Since July, it has even appeared in our top 100 for the first time in 2023.
exmaple.com, on the other hand, is not in our top 100 list, and only appears in our top 100k top domains list. You can find our domains lists, including a top 100, and unordered CSV lists up to Top 1 million domains, on Cloudflare Radar and through our API.
Just by checking DNS data from those who use our resolver, the original example.com gets around 2.6 billion DNS queries every day. This number has been consistently increasing since 2022, more than doubling. Here's the chart to show it:
What about exmaple.com? DNS queries are significantly lower by an order of magnitude. On average, it receives around 40,000 DNS queries per day, with occasional spikes reaching 80,000 to 90,000 — there’s one 160k July 23, 2022, spike. It's also noteworthy that there are more DNS queries on weekdays and fewer on weekends, which is not the case for example.com.
Conclusion: Errare humanum est
“Some of the worst problems that happen on the Internet are not because somebody deliberately caused the problem. It’s because somebody made a mistake. We’ve lost half the networks ability to transport traffic or route it to the right destinations because somebody made a configuration mistake”. — Vint Cerf, American Internet pioneer, in a 2016’s article: Vinton G. Cerf: Human error, not hackers threaten Net.
Even if traffic to exmaple.com arrives without consequences, a typo from a technician in a device for the wrong and malicious domain, could definitely have a negative impact if protections are not put in place. The typical Internet user is also susceptible to sending emails to the wrong address due to typos or could be tricked by domains resembling popular brands, but with errors.
Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome Lucius Seneca stated two thousand years ago, Errare humanum est or in plain English: to err is human. This held true for humans in the year AD 30 and remains so for humans in 2023. And the Internet, the complex network of networks that has grown larger than even its human inventors anticipated, is no stranger of these human errors, and its consequences. Quoting once again from Vint Cerf, “we need to have much better tools for writing software to avoid some of those stupid mistakes that cause problems in the Internet”.
After all this geeky analysis, my autocorrect finally recognizes "exmaple.com" and doesn't change it to "example.com". Success.
(Thanks to Jorge Pacheco, Sofia Cardita, Jérôme Fleury, and Marek Majkowski for their contributions to this blog post.)
Cloudflare Radar was launched in September 2020, almost three years ago, when the pandemic was affecting Internet traffic usage. It is a free tool to show Internet usage patterns from both human and automated systems, as well as attack trends, top domains, and adoption and usage of browsers and protocols. As Cloudflare has been publishing data-driven insights related to the general Internet for more than 10 years now, Cloudflare Radar is a natural evolution.
This year, we have introduced several new features to Radar, also available through our public API, that enables deeper data exploration. We’ve also launched an Internet Quality section, a Trending Domains section, a URL Scanner tool, and a Routing section to track network interconnection, routing security, and observed routing anomalies.
In this reading list, we want to highlight some of those new additions, as well as some of the Internet disruptions and trends we’ve observed and published posts about during this year, including the war in Ukraine, the impact of Easter, and exam-related shutdowns in Iraq and Algeria.
We also encourage everyone to explore Cloudflare Radar and its new features, and to give you a partial review of the year, in terms of Internet insights — our 2023 Year in Review is coming later this year.
New additions to Cloudflare Radar
In 2022, Cloudflare Radar 2.0 was released last September, refreshing the look & feel and building on a new platform that allows us to easily add new features in the future. At that time, we added two new sections:
Cloudflare Radar’s 2022 Year in Review and the related blog were published at the end of the year.
Without further ado, here are some of the new features launched in 2023.
Analyze any URL safely using the Cloudflare Radar URL Scanner (✍️)
If you're invited to click on a link and if you're unsure about its safety, or if you simply want to verify technical details about a particular site, URL Scanner is here to assist. Provide us with a URL, and our scanner will compile a report containing a myriad of technical details: risk assessment, SSL certificate data, HTTP request and response data, page performance data, DNS records, associated cookies, what technologies and libraries the page uses, and more.
Introducing the Cloudflare Radar Internet Quality Page (✍️)
In June 2023, the new Internet Quality page was introduced to Cloudflare Radar, offering both country and network (autonomous system) level insight. This provides information on Internet connection performance (bandwidth) and quality (latency, jitter) over time based on benchmark test data as well as speed.cloudflare.com test results.
You can also see in a world map how the different countries compare with each other in different metrics from bandwidth to latency and jitter. Autonomous systems (AS) or networks are presented on individual pages, including Starlink’s AS14593. Latency is the metric that gives a better perspective on quality and improved Internet experience. Here’s the most recent global view on latency-based connection quality (lower is better):
Measuring the Internet's pulse: trending domains now on Cloudflare Radar (✍️)
Starting July 2023, our Domain Rankings page received enhancements through the inclusion of specific Trending Domains lists. While the top 100 list is typically dominated by the big names such as Google, Facebook, and Apple, there are trending domains that also tell interesting and even more local stories.
The Trending Domains lists highlight surges in interest from the previous day and previous week. For instance, we captured how nba.com was trending in 28 locations during the NBA Draft 2023, and how rt.com (a Russian-based news site) gained attention in multiple countries during the Wagner group mutiny in Russia. More recently, on the same subject, after the death of Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in a plane crash, flightradar24.com was trending in our daily list both in Russia and Ukraine.
The Internet is a vast, sprawling collection of networks (autonomous systems) that connect to each other, and routing is one of the most critical operations of the Internet. Launched in late July 2023, the new Cloudflare Radar Routing page examines the routing status of the Internet, including secure routing protocol deployment for a country and routing changes and anomalies. Included are routing security statistics, and also announced prefixes and connectivity insights. Why is that important? Routing decides how and where the Internet traffic should flow from the source to the destination, and deviations or anomalies can indicate potential issues that lead to connectivity disruptions.
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), is considered the postal service of the Internet, but as a routing protocol suffers from a number of security weaknesses. Within the Routing page, we also present BGP route leaks and BGP hijack detection results, highlighting relevant events detected for any given network or globally. Notably, BGP origin hijacks allow attackers to intercept, monitor, redirect, or drop traffic destined for the victim's networks. In this related blog post, we also explain how Cloudflare built its BGP hijack detection system (including notifications), from its design and implementation to its integration: Cloudflare Radar's new BGP origin hijack detection system.
General Internet insights from 2023
One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience (✍️)
This blog post details Internet insights during the war in Europe and discusses how Ukraine's Internet remained resilient in spite of dozens of attacks and disruptions in three different stages of the conflict.
Cloudflare observed multiple Internet disruptions in the first weeks of the war (Internet infrastructure was damaged, and Internet access was limited in besieged areas, like Mariupol), as well as airstrikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. We also emphasize how application-layer cyber attacks in Ukraine rose 1,300% in early March 2022 as compared to pre-war levels, the country’s Internet resilience during the war, and major growth in Starlink traffic from the country.
Cloudflare’s view of the Virgin Media outage in the UK (✍️)
At times, major Internet operators experience significant outages due to technical issues. In 2022, it was Canada’s Rogers that experienced a 17-hour disruption impacting millions of users, and in early April 2023, a similar incident occurred with the United Kingdom’s Virgin Media. In this case, there were two clear outages for a few hours during April 4, 2023.
The post examines the impact on Internet traffic, the availability of Virgin Media web properties, and how BGP activity offered insights into the root cause.
How Easter, Passover and Ramadan show up in Internet trends (✍️)
National holidays celebrated in various countries can influence local Internet traffic trends. That was the case during Easter, celebrated between April 7-10, 2023. In countries including Italy, Poland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, the United States, Mexico, and Australia, the Easter long weekend led to the lowest traffic levels of 2023 up to that point—over 100 days into the year. Traffic dipped most significantly on Easter Sunday, compared to the previous Sunday, in Poland (22% lower), Italy (18% lower), France (16% lower).
The post also illustrates Orthodox Easter trends, with Greece being most impacted. It examines Ramadan-related changes, where eating rituals impacted Internet patterns in several countries with significant Muslim populations, and Passover trends, showing how Israel’s Internet traffic dropped as much as 24%.
Effects of the conflict in Sudan on Internet patterns (✍️)
We’ve been monitoring changes and disruptions in Internet patterns linked to military interventions. In this Sudan-related blog post, we analyze the impact of the armed conflict between rival factions of the military government that began on April 15, 2023. Cloudflare observed varying disruptions in Internet traffic after that day, with a mix of clear outages and general decrease in traffic.
The most recent Internet pattern change linked to military intervention is the ongoing coup in Niger. This particular event caused a distinct traffic drop, likely tied to shifts in human Internet usage, given the absence of signs of consistent connectivity disruption.
How the coronation of King Charles III affected Internet traffic (✍️)
As the coronation ceremony of King Charles III unfolded in London on May 6, 2023, distinct spikes and dips in Internet traffic were observed, each coinciding with key moments of the event. Also, on Sunday during the Coronation Big Lunch event, and Prince William’s speech at night, both instances led to a clear traffic drop of up to 18% compared with the previous Sunday. The accompanying chart displays this trend.
During the coronation weekend, Canada and Australia also exhibited shifts in Internet traffic patterns. And within this coronation post, there’s also analysis on Internet traffic pattern changes when Queen Elizabeth II passed away on September 8, 2022.
Cloudflare’s view of Internet disruptions in Pakistan (✍️)
Following the arrest of ex-PM Imran Khan, violent protests led the Pakistani government to order the shutdown of mobile Internet services and blocking of social media platforms. Mobile network shutdowns in the country lasted for several days.
We examined the impact of these shutdowns on Internet traffic in Pakistan and traffic to Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver and how Pakistanis appeared to be using it in an attempt to maintain access to the open Internet.
Nine years of Project Galileo and how the last year has changed it (✍️)
For the ninth anniversary of our Project Galileo in June 2023, the focus turned towards providing access to affordable cybersecurity tools and sharing our learnings from protecting the most vulnerable communities. We also published a ninth anniversary Project Galileo report.
One of the highlights of the report was a clear DDoS attack targeting an organization related to international law. This incident occurred on the same day an international arrest warrant was issued for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian official Maria Lvova-Belova, on March 17, 2023. Another standout observation involved the spikes in traffic experienced by Ukrainian emergency and humanitarian services, coinciding with bombings within the country.
Exam-related Internet shutdowns in Iraq and Algeria put connectivity to the test (✍️)
Since early June 2023, we’ve seen Iraq implementing a series of multi-hour shutdowns that continued through July and into August, as documented in our Outage Center. Algeria took similar actions, but using a content blocking-based approach, instead of the wide-scale Internet shutdowns, to prevent cheating on baccalaureate exams. This summer, these exam-related shutdowns were also implemented in Syria.
Cloudflare has previously observed and reported on similar occurrences in 2022 and also in 2021, in Syria and Sudan.
2023 has been a busy year for different types of Internet disruptions and outages, from government-directed shutdowns to natural incidents.
Reports: DDoS, Internet disruptions, and application security
Within Cloudflare Radar’s reports section, you will find a diverse array of perspectives on the Internet. From the Project Galileo 9th Anniversary — focused on aiding significant yet vulnerable online voices — to the more recent Q2 2023 Browsers and Search Engines reports. Some reports, such as the DDoS attack trends one, are also blog posts. Others are only available as blog posts, like the Internet disruptions summary, expanding on entries in the Outage Center, and the Application Security report.
This post delves into Internet disruptions observed by Cloudflare during the second quarter of 2023. Since 2022, we have been consistently offering these quarterly overviews of disruptions, and Q2 proved to be a busy quarter, with different types of disruptions:
There were several government directed shutdowns, including the ones related to “exam season” in several Middle Eastern and African countries, that continue through August.
Severe weather also played a role with a “Super Typhoon”-related disruption on the US territory of Guam.
Cable damage was behind disruptions in Bolivia, the Gambia and the Philippines.
Power outage-related Internet disruptions were observed in Curaçao, Portugal, and Botswana.
More generic technical problems impacted SpaceX Starlink’s satellite service, and Virgin Media in the United Kingdom.
Cyberattacks played a role in disruptions in both Russia and Ukraine.
Military action-related outages were observed in Chad and Sudan.
There were also maintenance related outages that affected Togo, Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), and Burkina Faso.
The Internet disruptions overview for Q1 2023 included another cause, a massive earthquake. The early February 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Turkey, which also affected Syria, caused widespread damage and tens of thousands of fatalities, and resulted in significant disruptions to Internet connectivity in multiple regions for several weeks.
Since 2020, our DDoS reports/blog posts have been focused on uncovering new attack trends, identifying the most affected countries, and showing targeted industries. Our Q2 2023 DDoS threats blog post highlights an unprecedented escalation in DDoS attack sophistication. Pro-Russian hacktivists REvil, Killnet, and Anonymous Sudan joined forces to attack Western sites. Exploits related to the zero-day vulnerability known as TP240PhoneHome surged by a whopping 532%, and attacks on crypto rocketed up by 600%.
An associated interactive version of this report is available on Cloudflare Radar. Furthermore, we’ve also added a new interactive component to Radar’s security section that allows you to dive deeper into attack activity in each country or region.
Our Application Security report has been around since 2022. The latest one highlights new attack trends and insights visible through Cloudflare’s global network. Some highlights include:
Daily mitigated HTTP requests decreased by 2 percentage points to 6% on average from 2021 to 2022, but days with larger than usual malicious activity were clearly seen across the network.
Application owners are increasingly relying on geo location blocks.
On average, more than 10% of non-verified bot traffic is mitigated. Compared to the last report, non-verified bot HTTP traffic mitigation is currently on a downward trend (down 6 percentage points).
65% of global API traffic is generated by browsers.
HTTP Anomalies are the most common attack vector on API endpoints, with 64%, followed by SQLi injection attacks (11%) and XSS attacks (9%).
The network of networks, also known as the Internet, is both complex and already seen as a human basic right—enabling work, leisure, communication, knowledge acquisition, and the pursuit of opportunities.
In 2023, Cloudflare Radar introduced new capabilities that facilitate the exploration of a broader array of insights and trends showing the Internet's various facets. These include Internet quality, insights into trending domains, and pertinent routing changes. There’s also no lack of general Internet insights and reports that try to offer different perspectives on 2023 events and occurrences and their impact. And already in August 2023, we’ve launched the “date picker” functionality, allowing any user to go back in time by selecting arbitrary date ranges. It looks like this:
In 2023, cybersecurity continues to be in most cases a need-to-have for those who don’t want to take chances on getting caught in a cyberattack and its consequences. Attacks have gotten more sophisticated, while conflicts (online and offline, and at the same time) continue, including in Ukraine. Governments have heightened their cyber warnings and put together strategies, including around critical infrastructure (including health and education). All of this, at a time when there were never so many online risks, but also people online — over five billion in July 2023, 64.5% of the now eight billion that are the world’s total population.
Here we take a look at what we’ve been discussing in 2023, so far, in our Cloudflare blog related to attacks and online security in general, with several August reading list suggestions. From new trends, products, initiatives or partnerships, including AI service safety, to record-breaking blocked cyberattacks. On that note, our AI hub (ai.cloudflare.com) was just launched.
Throughout the year, Cloudflare has continued to onboard customers while they were being attacked, and we have provided protection to many others, including once.net, responsible for the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest online voting system — the European event reached 162 million people.
Our global network — a.k.a. Supercloud — gives us a unique vantage point. Cloudflare’s extensive scale also helps enhance security, with preventive services powered by machine learning, like our recent WAF attack scoring system to stop attacks before they become known or even malware.
Recently, we announced our presence in more than 300 cities across over 100 countries, with interconnections to over 12,000 networks and still growing. We provide services for around 20% of websites online and to millions of Internet properties.
Attacks increasing. A readiness and trust game
Let’s start with providing some context. There are all sorts of attacks, but they have been, generally speaking, increasing. In Q2 2023, Cloudflare blocked an average of 140 billion cyber threats per day. One year ago, when we wrote a similar blog post, it was 124 billion, a 13% increase year over year. Attackers are not holding back, with more sophisticated attacks rising, and sectors such as education or healthcare as the target.
Artificial intelligence (AI), like machine learning, is not new, but it has been trending in 2023, and certain capabilities are more generally available. This has raised concerns about the quality of deception and even AI hackers.
This year, governments have also continued to release reports and warnings. In 2022, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) created the Shields Up initiative in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In March 2023, the Biden-Harris Administration released the National Cybersecurity Strategy aimed at securing the Internet.
That said, here are the reading suggestions related to more general country related attacks, but also policy and trust cybersecurity:
One year of war in Ukraine: Internet trends, attacks, and resilience (✍️)
This blog post reports on Internet insights during the war in Europe, and discusses how Ukraine's Internet remained resilient in spite of dozens of attacks, and disruptions in three different stages of the conflict.
Application-layer cyber attacks in Ukraine rose 1,300% in early March 2022 compared to pre-war levels.
The White House’s National Cybersecurity Strategy asks the private sector to step up to fight cyber attacks. Cloudflare is ready (✍️)
The White House released in March 2023 the National Cybersecurity Strategy aimed at preserving and extending the open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and securing the Internet. Cloudflare welcomed the Strategy, and the much-needed policy initiative, highlighting the need of defending critical infrastructure, where Zero Trust plays a big role. In the same month, Cloudflare announced its commitment to the 2023 Summit for Democracy. Also related to these initiatives, in March 2022, we launched our very own Critical Infrastructure Defense Project (CIDP), and in December 2022, Cloudflare launched Project Safekeeping, offering Zero Trust solutions to certain eligible entities in Australia, Japan, Germany, Portugal and the United Kingdom.
Secure by default: recommendations from the CISA’s newest guide, and how Cloudflare follows these principles to keep you secure (✍️)
In this April 2023 post we reviewed the “default secure” posture, and recommendations that were the focus of a recently published guide jointly authored by several international agencies. It had US, UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, and New Zealand contributions. Long story short, using all sorts of tools, machine learning and a secure-by-default and by-design approach, and a few principles, will make all the difference.
Nine years of Project Galileo and how the last year has changed it (✍️) + Project Galileo Report (✍️)
Between July 1, 2022, and May 5, 2023, Cloudflare mitigated 20 billion attacks against organizations protected under Project Galileo. This is an average of nearly 67.7 million cyber attacks per day over the last 10 months.
For LGBTQ+ organizations, we saw an average of 790,000 attacks mitigated per day over the last 10 months, with a majority of those classified as DDoS attacks.
Attacks targeting civil society organizations are generally increasing. We have broken down an attack aimed at a prominent organization, with the request volume climbing as high as 667,000 requests per second. Before and after this time the organization saw little to no traffic.
In Ukraine, spikes in traffic to organizations that provide emergency response and disaster relief coincide with bombings of the country over the 10-month period.
Project Cybersafe Schools: bringing security tools for free to small K-12 school districts in the US (✍️)
Already in August 2023, Cloudflare introduced an initiative aimed at small K-12 public school districts: Project Cybersafe Schools. Announced as part of the Back to School Safely: K-12 Cybersecurity Summit at the White House on August 7, Project Cybersafe Schools will support eligible K-12 public school districts with a package of Zero Trust cybersecurity solutions — for free, and with no time limit. In Q2 2023, Cloudflare blocked an average of 70 million cyber threats each day targeting the U.S. education sector, and a 47% increase in DDoS attacks quarter-over-quarter.
Privacy concerns also go hand in hand with security online, and we’ve provided further details on this topic earlier this year in relation to our investment in security to protect data privacy. Cloudflare also achieved a new EU Cloud Code of Conduct privacy validation.
This is what a record-breaking DDoS attack (exceeding 71 million requests per second) looks like.
DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service) are not new, but they’re still one of the main tools used by attackers. In Q2 2023, Cloudflare witnessed an unprecedented escalation in DDoS attack sophistication, and our report delves into this phenomenon. Pro-Russian hacktivists REvil, Killnet and Anonymous Sudan joined forces to attack Western sites. Mitel vulnerability exploits surged by a whopping 532%, and attacks on crypto rocketed up by 600%. Also, more broadly, attacks exceeding three hours have increased by 103% quarter-over-quarter.
This blog post and the corresponding Cloudflare Radar report shed light on some of these trends. On the other hand, in our Q1 2023 DDoS threat report, a surge in hyper-volumetric attacks that leverage a new generation of botnets that are comprised of Virtual Private Servers (VPS) was observed.
Killnet and AnonymousSudan DDoS attack Australian university websites, and threaten more attacks — here’s what to do about it (✍️)
In late March 2023, Cloudflare observed HTTP DDoS attacks targeting university websites in Australia. Universities were the first of several groups publicly targeted by the pro-Russian hacker group Killnet and their affiliate AnonymousSudan. This post not only shows a trend with these organized groups targeted attacks but also provides specific recommendations.
In January 2023, something similar was seen with increased cyberattacks to Holocaust educational websites protected by Cloudflare’s Project Galileo.
Uptick in healthcare organizations experiencing targeted DDoS attacks (✍️)
In early February 2023, Cloudflare, as well as other sources, observed an uptick in healthcare organizations targeted by a pro-Russian hacktivist group claiming to be Killnet. There was an increase in the number of these organizations seeking our help to defend against such attacks. Additionally, healthcare organizations that were already protected by Cloudflare experienced mitigated HTTP DDoS attacks.
Cloudflare mitigates record-breaking 71 million request-per-second DDoS attack (✍️)
Also in early February, Cloudflare detected and mitigated dozens of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks, one of those that became a record-breaking one. The majority of attacks peaked in the ballpark of 50-70 million requests per second (rps) with the largest exceeding 71Mrps. This was the largest reported HTTP DDoS attack on record to date, more than 54% higher than the previous reported record of 46M rps in June 2022.
SLP: a new DDoS amplification vector in the wild (✍️)
This blog post from April 2023 highlights how researchers have published the discovery of a new DDoS reflection/amplification attack vector leveraging the SLP protocol (Service Location Protocol). The prevalence of SLP-based DDoS attacks is also expected to rise, but our automated DDoS protection system keeps Cloudflare customers safe.
Additionally, this year, also in April, a new and improved Network Analytics dashboard was introduced, providing security professionals insights into their DDoS attack and traffic landscape.
For the second year in a row we published our Application Security Report. There’s a lot to unpack here, in a year when, according to Netcraft, Cloudflare became the most commonly used web server vendor within the top million sites (it has now a 22% market share). Here are some highlights:
6% of daily HTTP requests (proxied by the Cloudflare network) are mitigated on average. It’s down two percentage points compared to last year.
DDoS mitigation accounts for more than 50% of all mitigated traffic, so it’s still the largest contributor to mitigated layer 7 (application layer) HTTP requests.
Compared to last year, however, mitigation by the Cloudflare WAF (Web Application Firewall) has grown significantly, and now accounts for nearly 41% of mitigated requests.
HTTP Anomaly (examples include malformed method names, null byte characters in headers, etc.) is the most frequent layer 7 attack vectors mitigated by the WAF.
30% of HTTP traffic is automated (bot traffic). 55% of dynamic (non cacheable) traffic is API related. 65% of global API traffic is generated by browsers.
16% of non-verified bot HTTP traffic is mitigated.
HTTP Anomaly surpasses SQLi (code injection technique used to attack data-driven applications) as the most common attack vector on API endpoints. Brute force account takeover attacks are increasing. Also, Microsoft Exchange is attacked more than WordPress.
How Cloudflare can help stop malware before it reaches your app (✍️)
In April 2023, we made the job of application security teams easier, by providing a content scanning engine integrated with our Web Application Firewall (WAF), so that malicious files being uploaded by end users, never reach origin servers in the first place. Since September 2022, our Cloudflare WAF became smarter in helping stop attacks before they are known.
Announcing WAF Attack Score Lite and Security Analytics for business customers (✍️)
In March 2023, we announced that our machine learning empowered WAF and Security analytics view were made available to our Business plan customers, to help detect and stop attacks before they are known. In a nutshell: Early detection + Powerful mitigation = Safer Internet. Or:
Phishing remains the primary way to breach organizations. According to CISA, 90% of cyber attacks begin with it. The FBI has been publishing Internet Crime Reports, and in the most recent, phishing continues to be ranked #1 in the top five Internet crime types. Reported phishing crimes and victim losses increased by 1038% since 2018, reaching 300,497 incidents in 2022. The FBI also referred to Business Email Compromise as the $43 billion problem facing organizations, with complaints increasing by 127% in 2022, resulting in $3.31 billion in related losses, compared to 2021.
In 2022, Cloudflare Area 1 kept 2.3 billion unwanted messages out of customer inboxes. This year, that number will be easily surpassed.
In August 2023, Cloudflare published its first phishing threats report — fully available here. The report explores key phishing trends and related recommendations, based on email security data from May 2022 to May 2023.
Some takeaways include how attackers using deceptive links was the #1 phishing tactic — and how they are evolving how they get you to click and when they weaponize the link. Also, identity deception takes multiple forms (including business email compromise (BEC) and brand impersonation), and can easily bypass email authentication standards.
More than one year ago, Cloudflare acquired Area 1 Security, and with that we added to our Cloudflare Zero Trust platform an essential cloud-native email security service that identifies and blocks attacks before they hit user inboxes. This year, we’ve obtained one of the best ways to provide customers assurance that the sensitive information they send to us can be kept safe: a SOC 2 Type II report.
Email Link Isolation: your safety net for the latest phishing attacks (✍️)
Back in January, during our CIO Week, Email Link Isolation was made generally available to all our customers. What is it? A safety net for the suspicious links that end up in inboxes and that users may click — anyone can click on the wrong link by mistake. This added protection turns Cloudflare Area 1 into the most comprehensive email security solution when it comes to protecting against malware, phishing attacks, etc. Also, in true Cloudflare fashion, it’s a one-click deployment.
Phishing attacks come in all sorts of ways to fool people. This high level “phish” guide, goes over the different types — while email is definitely the most common, there are others —, and provides some tips to help you catch these scams before you fall for them.
Top 50 most impersonated brands in phishing attacks and new tools you can use to protect your employees from them (✍️)
Here we go over arguably one of the hardest challenges any security team is constantly facing, detecting, blocking, and mitigating the risks of phishing attacks. During our Security Week in March, a Top 50 list of the most impersonated brands in phishing attacks was presented (spoiler alert: AT&T Inc., PayPal, and Microsoft are on the podium).
Additionally, it was also announced the expansion of the phishing protections available to Cloudflare One customers by automatically identifying — and blocking — so-called “confusable” domains. What is Cloudflare One? It’s our suite of products that provides a customizable, and integrated with what a company already uses, Zero Trust network-as-a-service platform. It’s built for that already mentioned ease of mind and fearless online use. Cloudflare One, along with the use of physical security keys, was what thwarted the sophisticated “Oktapus” phishing attack targeting Cloudflare employees last summer.
Groundbreaking technology brings groundbreaking challenges. Cloudflare has experience protecting some of the largest AI applications in the world, and in this blog post there are some tips and best practices for securing generative AI applications. Success in consumer-facing applications inherently expose the underlying AI systems to millions of users, vastly increasing the potential attack surface.
Using the power of Cloudflare’s global network to detect malicious domains using machine learning (✍️)
Taking into account the objective of preventing threats before they create havoc, here we go over that Cloudflare recently developed proprietary models leveraging machine learning and other advanced analytical techniques. These are able to detect security threats that take advantage of the domain name system (DNS), known as the phonebook of the Internet.
How sophisticated scammers and phishers are preying on customers of Silicon Valley Bank (✍️)
In order to breach trust and trick unsuspecting victims, threat actors overwhelmingly use topical events as lures. The news about what happened at Silicon Valley Bank earlier this year was one of the latest events to watch out for and stay vigilant against opportunistic phishing campaigns using SVB as the lure. At that time, Cloudforce One (Cloudflare’s threat operations and research team) significantly increased our brand monitoring focused on SVB’s digital presence.
How Cloudflare can help stop malware before it reaches your app (✍️)
In April 2023, Cloudflare launched a tool to make the job of application security teams easier, by providing a content scanning engine integrated with our Web Application Firewall (WAF), so that malicious files being uploaded by end users, never reach origin servers in the first place.
Analyze any URL safely using the Cloudflare Radar URL Scanner (✍️)
Cloudflare Radar is our free platform for Internet insights. In March, our URL Scanner was launched, allowing anyone to analyze a URL safely. The report that it creates contains a myriad of technical details, including a phishing scan. Many users have been using it for security reasons, but others are just exploring what’s under-the-hood look at any webpage.
Unmasking the top exploited vulnerabilities of 2022 (✍️)
Last, but not least, already from August 2023, this blog post focuses on the most commonly exploited vulnerabilities, according to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Given Cloudflare’s role as a reverse proxy to a large portion of the Internet, we delve into how the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) mentioned by CISA are being exploited on the Internet, and a bit of what has been learned.
If you want to learn about making a website more secure (and faster) while loading third-party tools like Google Analytics 4, Facebook CAPI, TikTok, and others, you can get to know our Cloudflare Zaraz solution. It reached general availability in July 2023.
Wrap up
“The Internet was not built for what it has become”.
This is how one of Cloudflare’s S-1 document sections begins. It is also commonly referenced in our blog to show how this remarkable experiment, the network of networks, wasn’t designed for the role it now plays in our daily lives and work. Security, performance and privacy are crucial in a time when anyone can be the target of an attack, threat, or vulnerability. While AI can aid in mitigating attacks, it also adds complexity to attackers' tactics.
With that in mind, as we've highlighted in this 2023 reading list suggestions/online attacks guide, prioritizing the prevention of detrimental attack outcomes remains the optimal strategy. Hopefully, it will make some of the attacks on your company go unnoticed or be consequences-free, or even transform them into interesting stories to share when you access your security dashboard.
If you're interested in exploring specific examples, you can delve into case studies within our hub, where you’ll find security related stories from different institutions. From a technology company like Sage, to the State of Arizona, or the Republic of Estonia Information Security Authority, and even Cybernews, a cybersecurity news media outlet.
And because the future of a private and secure Internet is also in our minds, it's worth mentioning that in March 2022, Cloudflare enabled post-quantum cryptography support for all our customers. The topic of post-quantum cryptography, designed to be secure against the threat of quantum computers, is quite interesting and worth some delving into, but even without knowing what it is, it’s good to know that protection is already here.
If you want to try some security features mentioned, the Cloudflare Security Center is a good place to start (free plans included). The same applies to our Zero Trust ecosystem (or Cloudflare One as our SASE, Secure Access Service Edge) that is available as self-serve, and also includes a free plan. This vendor-agnostic roadmap shows the general advantages of the Zero Trust architecture, and as we’ve seen, there’s also one focused on high risk organizations.
Welcome to the second DDoS threat report of 2023. DDoS attacks, or distributed denial-of-service attacks, are a type of cyber attack that aims to disrupt websites (and other types of Internet properties) to make them unavailable for legitimate users by overwhelming them with more traffic than they can handle — similar to a driver stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the grocery store.
We see a lot of DDoS attacks of all types and sizes and our network is one of the largest in the world spanning more than 300 cities in over 100 countries. Through this network we serve over 63 million HTTP requests per second at peak and over 2 billion DNS queries every day. This colossal amount of data gives us a unique vantage point to provide the community access to insightful DDoS trends.
For our regular readers, you might notice a change in the layout of this report. We used to follow a set pattern to share our insights and trends about DDoS attacks. But with the landscape of DDoS threats changing as DDoS attacks have become more powerful and sophisticated, we felt it's time for a change in how we present our findings. So, we'll kick things off with a quick global overview, and then dig into the major shifts we're seeing in the world of DDoS attacks.
Reminder: an interactive version of this report is also available on Cloudflare Radar. Furthermore, we’ve also added a new interactive component that will allow you to dive deeper into attack activity in each country or region.
New interactive Radar graph to shed light on local DDoS activity
The DDoS landscape: a look at global patterns
The second quarter of 2023 was characterized by thought-out, tailored and persistent waves of DDoS attack campaigns on various fronts, including:
Multiple DDoS offensives orchestrated by pro-Russian hacktivist groups REvil, Killnet and Anonymous Sudan against Western interest websites.
An increase in deliberately engineered and targeted DNS attacks alongside a 532% surge in DDoS attacks exploiting the Mitel vulnerability (CVE-2022-26143). Cloudflare contributed to disclosing this zero-day vulnerability last year.
Attacks targeting Cryptocurrency companies increased by 600%, as a broader 15% increase in HTTP DDoS attacks was observed. Of these, we’ve noticed an alarming escalation in attack sophistication which we will cover more in depth.
Additionally, one of the largest attacks we’ve seen this quarter was an ACK flood DDoS attack which originated from a Mirai-variant botnet comprising approximately 11K IP addresses. The attack targeted an American Internet Service Provider. It peaked at 1.4 terabit per seconds (Tbps) and was automatically detected and mitigated by Cloudflare’s systems.
Despite general figures indicating an increase in overall attack durations, most of the attacks are short-lived and so was this one. This attack lasted only two minutes. However, more broadly, we’ve seen that attacks exceeding 3 hours have increased by 103% QoQ.
Now having set the stage, let’s dive deeper into these shifts we’re seeing in the DDoS landscape.
Mirai botnet attacks an American Service Provider, peaks at 1.4 Tbps
Hacktivist alliance dubbed “Darknet Parliament” aims at Western banks and SWIFT network
On June 14, Pro-Russian hacktivist groups Killnet, a resurgence of REvil and Anonymous Sudan announced that they have joined forces to execute “massive” cyber attacks on the Western financial system including European and US banks, and the US Federal Reserve System. The collective, dubbed “Darknet Parliament”, declared its first objective was to paralyze SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication). A successful DDoS attack on SWIFT could have dire consequences because it's the main service used by financial institutions to conduct global financial transactions.
Beyond a handful of publicized events such as the Microsoft outage which was reported by the media, we haven’t observed any novel DDoS attacks or disruptions targeting our customers. Our systems have been automatically detecting and mitigating attacks associated with this campaign. Over the past weeks, as many as 10,000 of these DDoS attacks were launched by the Darknet Parliament against Cloudflare-protected websites (see graph below).
REvil, Killnet and Anonymous Sudan attacks
Despite the hacktivists’ statements, Banking and Financial Services websites were only the ninth most attacked industry — based on attacks we’ve seen against our customers as part of this campaign.
Top industries attacked by the REvil, Killnet and Anonymous Sudan attack campaign
The most attacked industries were Computer Software, Gambling & Casinos and Gaming. Telecommunications and Media outlets came in fourth and fifth, respectively. Overall, the largest attack we witnessed in this campaign peaked at 1.7 million requests per second (rps) and the average was 65,000 rps.
For perspective, earlier this year we mitigated the largest attack in recorded history peaking at 71 million rps. So these attacks were very small compared to Cloudflare scale, but not necessarily for an average website. Therefore, we shouldn’t underestimate the damage potential on unprotected or suboptimally configured websites.
Sophisticated HTTP DDoS attacks
An HTTP DDoS attack is a DDoS attack over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It targets HTTP Internet properties such as websites and API gateways. Over the past quarter, HTTP DDoS attacks increased by 15% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) despite a 35% decrease year-over-year (YoY).
Illustration of an HTTP DDoS attack
Additionally, we've observed an alarming uptick in highly-randomized and sophisticated HTTP DDoS attacks over the past few months. It appears as though the threat actors behind these attacks have deliberately engineered the attacks to try and overcome mitigation systems by adeptly imitating browser behavior very accurately, in some cases, by introducing a high degree of randomization on various properties such as user agents and JA3 fingerprints to name a few. An example of such an attack is provided below. Each different color represents a different randomization feature.
Example of a highly randomized HTTP DDoS attack
Furthermore, in many of these attacks, it seems that the threat actors try to keep their attack rates-per-second relatively low to try and avoid detection and hide amongst the legitimate traffic.
This level of sophistication has previously been associated with state-level and state-sponsored threat actors, and it seems these capabilities are now at the disposal of cyber criminals. Their operations have already targeted prominent businesses such as a large VoIP provider, a leading semiconductor company, and a major payment & credit card provider to name a few.
Protecting websites against sophisticated HTTP DDoS attacks requires intelligent protection that is automated and fast, that leverages threat intelligence, traffic profiling and Machine Learning/statistical analysis to differentiate between attack traffic and user traffic. Moreover, even increasing caching where applicable can help reduce the risk of attack traffic impacting your origin. Read more about DDoS protection best practices here.
DNS Laundering DDoS attacks
The Domain Name System, or DNS, serves as the phone book of the Internet. DNS helps translate the human-friendly website address (e.g. www.cloudflare.com) to a machine-friendly IP address (e.g. 104.16.124.96). By disrupting DNS servers, attackers impact the machines’ ability to connect to a website, and by doing so making websites unavailable to users.
Over the past quarter, the most common attack vector was DNS-based DDoS attacks — 32% of all DDoS attacks were over the DNS protocol. Amongst these, one of the more concerning attack types we’ve seen increasing is the DNS Laundering attack which can pose severe challenges to organizations that operate their own authoritative DNS servers.
Top DDoS attack vectors in 2023 Q2
The term “Laundering” in the DNS Laundering attack name refers to the analogy of money laundering, the devious process of making illegally-gained proceeds, often referred to as "dirty money," appear legal. Similarly, in the DDoS world, a DNS Laundering attack is the process of making bad, malicious traffic appear as good, legitimate traffic by laundering it via reputable recursive DNS resolvers.
In a DNS Laundering attack, the threat actor will query subdomains of a domain that is managed by the victim’s DNS server. The prefix that defines the subdomain is randomized and is never used more than once or twice in such an attack. Due to the randomization element, recursive DNS servers will never have a cached response and will need to forward the query to the victim’s authoritative DNS server. The authoritative DNS server is then bombarded by so many queries until it cannot serve legitimate queries or even crashes all together.
Illustration of a DNS Laundering DDoS attack
From the protection point of view, the DNS administrators can’t block the attack source because the source includes reputable recursive DNS servers like Google’s 8.8.8.8 and Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1. The administrators also cannot block all queries to the attacked domain because it is a valid domain that they want to preserve access to legitimate queries.
The above factors make it very challenging to distinguish legitimate queries from malicious ones. A large Asian financial institution and a North American DNS provider are amongst recent victims of such attacks. An example of such an attack is provided below.
Example of a DNS Laundering DDoS attack
Similar to the protection strategies outlined for HTTP applications, protecting DNS servers also requires a precise, fast, and automated approach. Leveraging a managed DNS service or a DNS reverse proxy such as Cloudflare’s can help absorb and mitigate the attack traffic. For those more sophisticated DNS attacks, a more intelligent solution is required that leverages statistical analysis of historical data to be able to differentiate between legitimate queries and attack queries.
The rise of the Virtual Machine Botnets
As we’ve previously disclosed, we are witnessing an evolution in botnet DNA. The era of VM-based DDoS botnets has arrived and with it hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks. These botnets are comprised of Virtual Machines (VMs, or Virtual Private Servers, VPS) rather than Internet of Things (IoT) devices which makes them so much more powerful, up to 5,000 times stronger.
Illustration of an IoT botnet compared with a VM Botnet
Because of the computational and bandwidth resources that are at the disposal of these VM-based botnets, they’re able to generate hyper-volumetric attacks with a much smaller fleet size compared to IoT-based botnets.
These botnets have executed one largest recorded DDoS attacks including the 71 million request per second DDoS attack. Multiple organizations including an industry-leading gaming platform provider have already been targeted by this new generation of botnets.
Cloudflare has proactively collaborated with prominent cloud computing providers to combat these new botnets. Through the quick and dedicated actions of these providers, significant components of these botnets have been neutralized. Since this intervention, we have not observed any further hyper-volumetric attacks yet, a testament to the efficacy of our collaboration.
While we already enjoy a fruitful alliance with the cybersecurity community in countering botnets when we identify large-scale attacks, our goal is to streamline and automate this process further. We extend an invitation to cloud computing providers, hosting providers, and other general service providers to join Cloudflare’s free Botnet Threat Feed. This would provide visibility into attacks originating within their networks, contributing to our collective efforts to dismantle botnets.
“Startblast”: Exploiting Mitel vulnerabilities for DDoS attacks
This exploit operates by reflecting traffic off vulnerable servers, amplifying it in the process, with a factor as high as 220 billion percent. The vulnerability stems from an unauthenticated UDP port exposed to the public Internet, which could allow malicious actors to issue a 'startblast' debugging command, simulating a flurry of calls to test the system.
As a result, for each test call, two UDP packets are sent to the issuer, enabling an attacker to direct this traffic to any IP and port number to amplify a DDoS attack. Despite the vulnerability, only a few thousand of these devices are exposed, limiting the potential scale of attack, and attacks must run serially, meaning each device can only launch one attack at a time.
Top industries targeted by Startblast DDoS attacks
Overall, in the past quarter, we’ve seen additional emerging threats such as DDoS attacks abusing the TeamSpeak3 protocol. This attack vector increased by a staggering 403% this quarter.
TeamSpeak, a proprietary voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) that runs over UDP to help gamers talk with other gamers in real time. Talking instead of just chatting can significantly improve a gaming team’s efficiency and help them win. DDoS attacks that target TeamSpeak servers may be launched by rival groups in an attempt to disrupt their communication path during real-time multiplayer games and thus impact their team’s performance.
DDoS hotspots: The origins of attacks
Overall, HTTP DDoS attacks increased by 15% QoQ despite a 35% decrease YoY. Additionally, network-layer DDoS attacks decreased this quarter by approximately 14%.
HTTP DDoS attack requests by quarter
In terms of total volume of attack traffic, the US was the largest source of HTTP DDoS attacks. Three out of every thousand requests we saw were part of HTTP DDoS attacks originating from the US. China came in second place and Germany in third place.
Top source countries of HTTP DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic worldwide)
Some countries naturally receive more traffic due to various factors such as market size, and therefore more attacks. So while it’s interesting to understand the total amount of attack traffic originating from a given country, it is also helpful to remove that bias by normalizing the attack traffic by all traffic to a given country.
When doing so, we see a different pattern. The US doesn’t even make it into the top ten. Instead, Mozambique, Egypt and Finland take the lead as the source countries of the most HTTP DDoS attack traffic relative to all of their traffic. Almost a fifth of all HTTP traffic originating from Mozambique IP addresses were part of DDoS attacks.
Top source countries of HTTP DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic per country)
Using the same calculation methodology but for bytes, Vietnam remains the largest source of network-layer DDoS attacks (aka L3/4 DDoS attacks) for the second consecutive quarter — and the amount even increased by 58% QoQ. Over 41% of all bytes that were ingested in Cloudflare’s Vietnam data centers were part of L3/4 DDoS attacks.
Top source countries of L3/4 DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic per country)
Industries under attack: examining DDoS attack targets
When examining HTTP DDoS attack activity in Q2, Cryptocurrency websites were targeted with the largest amount of HTTP DDoS attack traffic. Six out of every ten thousand HTTP requests towards Cryptocurrency websites behind Cloudflare were part of these attacks. This represents a 600% increase compared to the previous quarter.
After Crypto, Gaming and Gambling websites came in second place as their attack share increased by 19% QoQ. Marketing and Advertising websites not far behind in third place with little change in their share of attacks.
Top industries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic for all industries)
However, when we look at the amount of attack traffic relative to all traffic for any given industry, the numbers paint a different picture. Last quarter, Non-profit organizations were attacked the most — 12% of traffic to Non-profits were HTTP DDoS attacks. Cloudflare protects more than 2,271 Non-profit organizations in 111 countries as part of Project Galileo which celebrated its ninth anniversary this year. Over the past months, an average of 67.7 million cyber attacks targeted Non-profits on a daily basis.
Overall, the amount of DDoS attacks on Non-profits increased by 46% bringing the percentage of attack traffic to 17.6%. However, despite this growth, the Management Consulting industry jumped to the first place with 18.4% of its traffic being DDoS attacks.
Top industries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic per industry)
When descending the layers of the OSI model, the Internet networks that were most targeted belonged to the Information Technology and Services industry. Almost every third byte routed to them were part of L3/4 DDoS attacks.
Surprisingly enough, companies operating in the Music industry were the second most targeted industry, followed by Broadcast Media and Aviation & Aerospace.
Top industries targeted by L3/4 DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic per industry)
Top attacked industries: a regional perspective
Cryptocurrency websites experienced the highest number of attacks worldwide, while Management Consulting and Non-profit sectors were the most targeted considering their total traffic. However, when we look at individual regions, the situation is a bit different.
Top industries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks by region
Africa
The Telecommunications industry remains the most attacked industry in Africa for the second consecutive quarter. The Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) industry follows as the second most attacked. The majority of the attack traffic originated from Asia (35%) and Europe (25%).
Asia
For the past two quarters, the Gaming and Gambling industry was the most targeted industry in Asia. In Q2, however, the Gaming and Gambling industry dropped to second place and Cryptocurrency took the lead as the most attacked industry (~50%). Substantial portions of the attack traffic originated from Asia itself (30%) and North America (30%).
Europe
For the third consecutive quarter, the Gaming & Gambling industry remains the most attacked industry in Europe. The Hospitality and Broadcast Media industries follow not too far behind as the second and third most attacked. Most of the attack traffic came from within Europe itself (40%) and from Asia (20%).
Latin America
Surprisingly, half of all attack traffic targeting Latin America was aimed at the Sporting Goods industry. In the previous quarter, the BFSI was the most attacked industry. Approximately 35% of the attack traffic originated from Asia, and another 25% originated from Europe.
Middle East
The Media & Newspaper industries were the most attacked in the Middle East. The vast majority of attack traffic originated from Europe (74%).
North America
For the second consecutive quarter, Marketing & Advertising companies were the most attacked in North America (approximately 35%). Manufacturing and Computer Software companies came in second and third places, respectively. The main sources of the attack traffic were Europe (42%) and the US itself (35%).
Oceania
This quarter, the Biotechnology industry was the most attacked. Previously, it was the Health & Wellness industry. Most of the attack traffic originated from Asia (38%) and Europe (25%).
Countries and regions under attack: examining DDoS attack targets
When examining the total volume of attack traffic, last quarter, Israel leaped to the front as the most attacked country. This quarter, attacks targeting Israeli websites decreased by 33% bringing it to the fourth place. The US takes the lead again as the most attacked country, followed by Canada and Singapore.
Top countries and regions targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic for all countries and regions)
If we normalize the data per country and region and divide the attack traffic by the total traffic, we get a different picture. Palestine jumps to the first place as the most attacked country. Almost 12% of all traffic to Palestinian websites were HTTP DDoS attacks.
Top countries and regions targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic per country and region)
Last quarter, we observed a striking deviation at the network layer, with Finnish networks under Cloudflare's shield emerging as the primary target. This surge was likely correlated with the diplomatic talks that precipitated Finland's formal integration into NATO. Roughly 83% of all incoming traffic to Finland comprised cyberattacks, with China a close second at 68% attack traffic.
This quarter, however, paints a very different picture. Finland has receded from the top ten, and Chinese Internet networks behind Cloudflare have ascended to the first place. Almost two-thirds of the byte streams towards Chinese networks protected by Cloudflare were malicious. Following China, Switzerland saw half of its inbound traffic constituting attacks, and Turkey came third, with a quarter of its incoming traffic identified as hostile.
Top countries and regions targeted by L3/4 DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic per country and region)
Ransom DDoS attacks
Occasionally, DDoS attacks are carried out to extort ransom payments. We’ve been surveying Cloudflare customers over three years now, and have been tracking the occurrence of Ransom DDoS attack events.
High level comparison of Ransomware and Ransom DDoS attacks
Unlike Ransomware attacks, where victims typically fall prey to downloading a malicious file or clicking on a compromised email link which locks, deletes or leaks their files until a ransom is paid, Ransom DDoS attacks can be much simpler for threat actors to execute. Ransom DDoS attacks bypass the need for deceptive tactics such as luring victims into opening dubious emails or clicking on fraudulent links, and they don't necessitate a breach into the network or access to corporate resources.
Over the past quarter, reports of Ransom DDoS attacks decreased. One out of ten respondents reported being threatened or subject to Ransom DDoS attacks.
Wrapping up: the ever-evolving DDoS threat landscape
In recent months, there's been an alarming escalation in the sophistication of DDoS attacks. And even the largest and most sophisticated attacks that we’ve seen may only last a few minutes or even seconds — which doesn’t give a human sufficient time to respond. Before the PagerDuty alert is even sent, the attack may be over and the damage is done. Recovering from a DDoS attack can last much longer than the attack itself — just as a boxer might need a while to recover from a punch to the face that only lasts a fraction of a second.
Security is not one single product or a click of a button, but rather a process involving multiple layers of defense to reduce the risk of impact. Cloudflare's automated DDoS defense systems consistently safeguard our clients from DDoS attacks, freeing them up to focus on their core business operations. These systems are complemented by the vast breadth of Cloudflare capabilities such as firewall, bot detection, API protection and even caching which can all contribute to reducing the risk of impact.
The DDoS threat landscape is evolving and increasingly complex, demanding more than just quick fixes. Thankfully, with Cloudflare's multi-layered defenses and automatic DDoS protections, our clients are equipped to navigate these challenges confidently. Our mission is to help build a better Internet, and so we continue to stand guard, ensuring a safer and more reliable digital realm for all.
Methodologies
How we calculate Ransom DDoS attack insights
Cloudflare’s systems constantly analyze traffic and automatically apply mitigation when DDoS attacks are detected. Each attacked 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, Cloudflare has been surveying attacked customers. One of the questions in the survey asks the respondents if they received a threat or a ransom note. Over the past two years, on average, we collected 164 responses per quarter. The responses of this survey are used to calculate the percentage of Ransom DDoS attacks.
How we calculate geographical and industry insights
Source country At the application-layer, we use the attacking IP addresses to understand the origin country of the attacks. That is because at that layer, IP addresses cannot be spoofed (i.e., altered). However, at the network layer, source IP addresses can be spoofed. So, instead of relying on IP addresses to understand the source, we instead use the location of our data centers where the attack packets were ingested. We’re able to get geographical accuracy due to our large global coverage in over 285 locations around the world.
Target country For both application-layer and network-layer DDoS attacks, we group attacks and traffic by our customers’ billing country. This lets us understand which countries are subject to more attacks.
Target industry For both application-layer and network-layer DDoS attacks, we group attacks and traffic by our customers’ industry according to our customer relations management system. This lets us understand which industries are subject to more attacks.
Total volume vs. percentage For both source and target insights, we look at the total volume of attack traffic compared to all traffic as one data point. Additionally, we also look at the percentage of attack traffic towards or from a specific country, to a specific country or to a specific industry. This gives us an “attack activity rate” for a given country/industry which is normalized by their total traffic levels. This helps us remove biases of a country or industry that normally receives a lot of traffic and therefore a lot of attack traffic as well.
How we calculate attack characteristics To calculate the attack size, duration, attack vectors and emerging threats, we bucket attacks and then provide the share of each bucket out of the total amount for each dimension. On the new Radar component, these trends are calculated by number of bytes instead. Since attacks may vary greatly in number of bytes from one another, this could lead to trends differing between the reports and the Radar component.
General disclaimer and clarification
When we describe ‘top countries’ as the source or target of attacks, it does not necessarily mean that that country was attacked as a country, but rather that organizations that use that country as their billing country were targeted by attacks. Similarly, attacks originating from a country does not mean that that country launched the attacks, but rather that the attack was launched from IP addresses that have been mapped to that country. Threat actors operate global botnets with nodes all over the world, and in many cases also use Virtual Private Networks and proxies to obfuscate their true location. So if anything, the source country could indicate the presence of exit nodes or botnet nodes within that country.
On Tuesday, May 9, Imran Khan, former Prime Minister of Pakistan was arrested on corruption charges. Following the arrest, violent protests erupted in several cities, leading the government of Pakistan to order the shutdown of mobile Internet services, as well as the blocking of several social media platforms. Below, we examine the impact of these shutdowns at a national and local level, as seen through Cloudflare traffic data. In addition, we illustrate how Pakistanis appear to be turning to Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 resolver in an attempt to maintain access to the open Internet.
General traffic trends
Since Tuesday, May 9, peak traffic levels aggregated at a country level (as measured by HTTP request volume) have been declining, down nearly 30% during the first several days of the mobile Internet shutdowns. The lowest traffic levels (nadirs of the graph) have also declined, dropping by as much as one-third as well. In the sections below, we drill down into this traffic loss, looking at outages at a network level, and the impact of those outages at an administrative unit and city level.
The mobile network shutdowns have also impacted the profile of traffic that Cloudflare sees from Pakistan. In analyzing traffic from desktop devices vs. mobile devices, we observed a 60% drop in request volume from mobile devices, while desktop traffic request volume remained fairly consistent. Peak mobile device traffic share dropped from 70% to 43%.
Cloudflare uses a bot score assigned to each request to indicate how likely it is that the request came from a bot or a human user. Since these shutdowns began, peak human request volume has dropped by 40%, while bot traffic has remained relatively consistent.
Mobile network shutdowns
On Wednesday, May 10, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) announced that Internet services would remain suspended across the country for an “indefinite” period, responding to a directive from the Ministry of the Interior to block mobile broadband services. As a result of the shutdowns associated with this directive, Cloudflare observed outages on the four major mobile providers within the country:
Although Pakistan has high mobile Internet usage, it appears that fixed broadband Internet connections are readily used as a backup when mobile connectivity becomes unavailable. Autonomous systems associated with fixed broadband networks saw significant increases in traffic when the mobile networks were shut down.
Interestingly, median latency within Pakistan also dropped slightly after mobile networks were shut down. Prior to the shutdown, median latency (as observed to Cloudflare and a set of other providers) was in the 90-100ms range, while afterwards, it has averaged closer to 75ms. This may be a result of users shifting to lower latency fixed broadband connections, as discussed above.
Administrative unit-level disruptions
Because the mobile network providers that were affected by the shutdown directive provide services nationwide, we also observed an impact to traffic across multiple administrative units within the country. None of these locations has experienced a complete outage, but peak traffic levels have clearly been declining in comparison to previous days.
Gilgit-Baltistan experienced the largest loss, where peak traffic has fallen nearly 60%. In Sindh, peak traffic is down around 35%, followed by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where it is down 30%. Islamabad and Azad Jammu and Kashmir have seen peak traffic declines of ~20%.
City-level disruptions
The impact of the mobile network shutdowns is also visible at a more local level, with lower peak traffic levels clearly visible in four cities. The significant traffic loss has been in Peshawar (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), which has dropped nearly 55% from prior days. Faisalabad (Punjab), Karachi (Sindh), and Multan (Punjab) have all seen peak traffic drop approximately 40%.
Content blocking
In addition to the government-directed mobile network shutdowns, Pakistan’s authorities have also ordered Internet service providers to block access to social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. Testing by the Open Observatory for Network Interference (OONI), an Internet censorship measurement organization, suggests that this blocking is using a combination of TLS-level interference and DNS-based blocking. When the latter occurs in a country, Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver often sees an increase in request volume from the country as users seek ways to continue to access the open Internet.
Over the last several days, as expected, 1.1.1.1 request volume from Pakistan has increased, up approximately 40%. Peak request volume for the blocked social media platforms has also increased. Traffic for facebook.com saw a significant increase starting around 14:00 UTC (19:00 local time) on May 9, with peak request volume more than doubling. Request volume for instagram.com, also owned by Facebook parent Meta, also began to increase around the same time, and has grown nearly 50%. Requests for twitter.com began to spike around 08:00 UTC (13:00 local time) on May 9, growing as much as 150% that afternoon. Request volume for youtube.com also spiked on May 9, increasing by approximately 40%. And like twitter.com, request volume on May 10 was higher than earlier in the week, but lower than the spike seen the previous day.
Conclusion
Because of the ubiquity of Internet connectivity and social media tools in everyday life, Internet shutdowns and website blocking ultimately come with a significant human and financial cost. The mobile network shutdowns in Pakistan have impacted tens of thousands of “gig workers” and freelancers that depend on mobile connectivity. Many point-of-sale terminals in the country also depend on mobile connectivity, with transactions through Pakistan’s main digital payment systems fell by around 50% after the shutdowns were put into place. Telecommunications operators within Pakistan have estimated the extent of the financial damage thus far to be Rs. 820 million (approximately $2.8 million USD).
Use Cloudflare Radar to monitor the impact of such government-directed Internet disruptions, and follow @CloudflareRadar on Twitter for updates on Internet disruptions as they occur.
When major events in a country happen Internet traffic patterns are often impacted, depending on the type of event. But what about the coronation of a king or queen? There’s no similar precedent, with a worldwide impact, in the Internet age, except maybe the coronation of the king of Thailand, in 2019. The last time it happened in the United Kingdom was 70 years ago (June 2, 1953), with Queen Elizabeth II; it was the first British coronation to be fully televised. Neither the Internet nor ARPANET were around at the time.
Imagine a grand royal event (if you saw the broadcast or the news, there’s no need), filled with pomp and pageantry, that's so captivating it impacts Internet traffic. That's what happened during the coronation of Charles III and Camilla, the newly crowned king and queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms. As the coronation ceremony unfolded, on Saturday morning, May 6, 2023, there were clear spikes and dips in traffic, each coinciding with key moments of the ceremony.
Then came Sunday, and with it, the Coronation Big Lunch event. As the nation sat down to enjoy a communal meal throughout the country, Internet traffic took a significant nosedive, dropping by as much as 18%. The Sunday trends didn't stop there. As night fell and Prince William took to the stage to deliver a speech during the Coronation Concert, there was a clear drop in Internet traffic. Monday, May 8, was a bank holiday in the UK in honor of the coronation, and after a weekend of outdoor coronation events, Internet traffic was buzzing, noticeably higher than usual.
In the past, we’ve seen Internet traffic drop when a national televised event is happening — last year, we saw it, including in the UK, during the Eurovision, although traffic does increase when results are in. Different types of events and broadcasts yield different Internet patterns.
Coronation day: a rollercoaster of Internet traffic
Let's take a closer look at coronation day, May 6, 2023, when Internet traffic in the UK had its own peaks and valleys. There were moments when the digital realm seemed to hold its breath, with traffic dipping to its lowest points. The arrival of the royals and their guests marked one such moment. As the anticipation built and all eyes turned to the grand entrances, Internet traffic dipped to a notable 7% lower than the previous week.
Here's a play-by-play of the day's traffic trends, compared to the previous week. We’re using a 15-minute granularity, and aligning with key events as reported live by the BBC:
When the royals and guests were arriving at Westminster Abbey. The King and Queen arrived at 11:00.
#2 — 12:00 (-2%)
When King Charles III (12:02) was crowned.
#3 — 13:00 (-3%)
When King Charles and Queen Camilla left Westminster Abbey. The Coronation Procession started.
On Saturday, May 6, 2023, a downward trend in traffic began after 06:15, with traffic 5% lower than the previous week. This trend shifted to a traffic increase after 11:15 (+6%), coinciding with the ongoing ceremony. The exceptions were the previously mentioned traffic dips. The following table illustrates clear traffic spikes after significant moments, some of which are represented in the previous table. Here's a list of periods with higher growth:
This happened after the military flypast (14:35), when the royals were on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.
#2 — 12:30 (+13.7%)
After King Charles III was crowned at 12:02 (at which time traffic dropped 2%) and after Queen Camilla (12:16) was crowned, when a choir was singing Agnus Dei (12:30).
#3 — 15:30-16:15 (+13%)
During the highlights of the event and reactions from royal fans.
#4 — 14:00 (+13%).
When the UK’s national anthem was played in the gardens of Buckingham Palace.
#5 — 11:30 (+11%).
Just after the coronation oath and during the choir’s singing.
As guests and royals arrived and during moments like the king's crowning, Internet traffic noticeably dropped. However, during parts of the ceremony such as the choir singing, Internet traffic seemed to increase. That was also clear after the military flypast, over the Buckingham Palace balcony.
The following chart illustrates UK Internet traffic during the weekend, with the purple dotted line representing the previous weekend.
On a daily basis, daily traffic was 4% higher on Saturday, May 6, compared to the previous Saturday.
The Big Lunch and Prince William’s speech
Another trend from the coronation weekend relates to the events that took place on Sunday, May 7. Internet trends here align with what we observed almost a year ago during Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee. Sunday was a day of celebration with both the Coronation Big Lunch (where neighbors and communities were invited to share food and fun together across the country) and the Coronation Concert taking place.
Next, we present the percentages of increase/decrease in requests during this past weekend, compared with the previous week (a slightly different perspective from the previous chart):
On Sunday, May 7, it's clear that UK traffic was lower than usual right after 07:00 local time (-2% in traffic), but it dropped the most after 12:00 (-5%), compared to the previous week. The moment with the biggest drop in traffic, compared to the previous week, was between 14:15 and 15:30, when traffic was around 18% lower. That was still Big Lunch time, given that it’s a multiple hour event full of “food and fun” — there were more than 65,000 Coronation Big Lunch events around the UK. During last year's Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee, traffic dropped as much as 25% on Sunday, June 5, 2022, at 15:00.
At night, the Coronation Concert took center stage, broadcast live from Windsor Castle on the BBC after 20:00. The lineup included musical guests such as Take That, Lionel Richie, Katy Perry, and Andrea Bocelli. However, the star of the event, at least in terms of when Internet traffic was at its lowest that evening, was William, Prince of Wales. Cloudflare observed another significant drop in traffic, compared to the previous week, around 21:15-21:30, when traffic was 7% lower than the previous week. At that time, Lionel Richie had just performed, and Prince William was on stage for a special address to the king.
In terms of daily traffic, if on Coronation Saturday we saw an increase (4%), on Coronation Sunday there was a 6% drop compared to the previous week. On Monday, the coronation bank holiday, there weren't any major coronation events, and traffic was 4% higher than the previous week (May 1, also a bank holiday in the UK).
Coronation, a mobile devices day
Zooming in on the distribution of traffic from mobile devices, we find that Saturday, May 6, stands out in 2023. On this day, mobile traffic accounted for 61% of total traffic, a figure only matched by April 15 and January 1, 2023. Similarly, Sunday, May 7, was one of the Sundays with the highest percentage of mobile traffic, at 60%. This percentage was only surpassed by Easter Sunday, April 9 (60.4%), and, unsurprisingly, January 1, 2023 (61%).
Wales sees the largest Sunday drop in Internet traffic
Which UK countries were more impacted? Looking at both coronation weekend days, we saw a similar pattern (growth in traffic at around the time of the coronation ceremony on Saturday, and decrease on Sunday) in all of them. Looking at the Sunday drop, England had as much as 16% in traffic at 15:30; Scotland had as much as a 17% drop at around 13:30; Wales had as much as a 19% drop at around 15:00; and Northern Ireland had as much as an 18% drop in traffic, compared to the previous week, at the same time. Wales had the biggest drop.
From Canada to Australia
Last year, in early June, we observed the impact of Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee on the Internet in the UK. This event, which celebrated the first British monarch to reach a 70th anniversary on the throne, caused a significant drop in traffic, as much as 25% (on Sunday, June 5, 2022). This trend was also noticeable in other Commonwealth countries.
Several Commonwealth countries also held notable events to celebrate both the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and the recent coronation. In Canada, events and activities related to the coronation mirrored those for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Whether related or not, we observed on Saturday, May 6, as much as an ~8% drop in Internet traffic compared to the previous week, between 09:30 and 16:30 Toronto time. On Sunday, the drop was even larger, with about 10% less traffic between 10:30 and 12:00.
In Australia, the difference in traffic wasn't as pronounced as in Canada. However, traffic was 7% lower than the previous week at 20:00 Sydney time (10:00 UTC), when the coronation ceremony began on May 6. This was the only period over the past weekend when traffic was lower than the previous one.
Social media and royals trends
And what about the impact on DNS traffic to our 1.1.1.1 resolver from UK users? Social media apps certainly felt the ripple. Domains linked to social media platforms, which typically surge in popularity during major events, such as Twitter, experienced a notable uptick. We saw a 33% increase in DNS traffic in those around 14:00 local time on Saturday, May 6, compared to the previous week. By 18:00 on May 7, traffic had soared to 64% higher, and it remained elevated during the Coronation Concert: at 22:00, it was 36% higher.
Meanwhile, video-centric social media platforms, like TikTok, hit their peak at around 20:00 on May 7, when the Coronation Concert was starting, with a whopping 57% surge in DNS traffic.
During the coronation weekend, the peak period for DNS traffic to domains related to the royal family fell between 11:00 and 12:00 local time. In this hour, traffic was an impressive forty times higher than the same time the previous weekend (that growth is higher, more than 40x, when using a May 2022 baseline, as is seen in the next chart).
If we broaden our view to the past 12 months, we see that the domains associated with the royal family hit their highest point on the day Queen Elizabeth II passed away, September 8. Around 18:00 local time, DNS traffic was 12x higher than the previous week. This was followed by the day of Her Majesty's funeral, September 19, when around 11:00, DNS traffic was 6x higher than usual.
A similar impact was seen, related to the Queen's death, on British news organizations, in the past 12 months. September 8, around 18:00, was the peak of the whole year in terms of DNS traffic to news organizations, according to our data. At that time, DNS traffic was 263% higher than at the same time in the previous week. During the September 19 funeral, at 11:00, DNS traffic was 24% higher than before.
During the recent coronation weekend, DNS traffic to UK news organizations on Saturday, May 6, was higher than usual during the morning by as much as 47%, at 11:00, and continued higher than before mostly during that day.
September 8, 2022: The end of a 70-year reign
We already mentioned domain trends related to when Queen Elizabeth II passed away on September 8, 2022. But what about the impact on Internet traffic? We saw a 7% decrease in Internet traffic in the UK on that day at around 18:30 local time compared to the previous week, coinciding with the announcement of her death.
The following weekend, on Saturday, September 10, 2022, traffic was as much as 17% lower at 15:00. This was the day Charles was proclaimed the new king and people flocked to the royal palaces to pay their respects — Prince William and Kate, and Prince Harry and Meghan, paused outside Windsor Castle to read messages left by mourners.
Internet traffic dropped even further compared to the previous week during Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral: on September 19, 2022, traffic was 27% lower at 10:45. According to Wikipedia, this was when the Queen's coffin was transported from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey on the State Gun Carriage of the Royal Navy.
Old traditions in a recent medium
In this blog post, we've seen how a very old tradition, like the British coronation, can impact a very recent innovation, the Internet. Almost 70 years ago, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation was the first ever to be televised, at a time when television in the UK was less than 20 years old. The event, which took place at Westminster Abbey in London (the site of coronations since 1066), was watched by 27 million people in the UK alone and millions more around the world.
This time around, King Charles III's coronation could be viewed through that now old medium called television, or online, via streaming services. The Internet is much younger than Britain’s former monarch's reign or even Sir Tim Berners-Lee (born in 1955), and it was only 30 years ago that the World Wide Web protocol and code were made available royalty-free, enabling the web's widespread use.
Streaming media events online, on the other hand, at least on a large scale, are a more recent development — YouTube was launched in 2005. Looking at video platforms trends in the UK, we could see how DNS traffic was 13% higher at around 12:00, during the coronation ceremony, on May 6 — it was broadcast on YouTube.
British broadcasters, such as the BBC, also included a streaming version of the event. There, the increase in DNS traffic was even higher. Between 11:00 and 12:00, on May 6, DNS traffic was 197% higher than in the previous week.
The difference in DNS traffic to UK's streaming services was even more pronounced when Queen Elizabeth II passed away on September 8, with a 470% increase in DNS traffic around 18:00 compared to the previous week. During the Queen's funeral on September 19, DNS traffic was 150% higher around 11:00 compared to the previous week.
On Saturday, April 15, 2023, an armed conflict between rival factions of the military government of Sudan began. Cloudflare observed a disruption in Internet traffic on that Saturday, starting at 08:00 UTC, which deepened on Sunday. Since then, the conflict has continued, and different ISPs have been affected, in some cases with a 90% drop in traffic. On May 2, Internet traffic is still ~30% lower than pre-conflict levels. This blog post will show what we’ve been seeing in terms of Internet disruption there.
On the day that clashes broke out, our data shows that traffic in the country dropped as much as 60% on Saturday, after 08:00 UTC, with a partial recovery on Sunday around 14:00, but it has consistently been lower than before. Although we saw outages and disruptions on major local Internet providers, the general drop in traffic could also be related to different human usage patterns because of the conflict, with people trying to leave the country. In Ukraine, we saw a clear drop in traffic, not always related to ISP outages, after the war started, when people were leaving the country.
Here’s the hourly perspective of Sudan’s Internet traffic over the past weeks as seen on Cloudflare Radar, with the orange shading highlighting the disruption since April 15.
The next chart of daily traffic in Sudan (that is dominated by mobile device traffic — more on that below) clearly shows a daily drop in traffic after April 15. On that Saturday, traffic was 27% lower than on the previous Saturday, and it was a 43% decrease on Sunday, April 16, compared to the previous week.
Frequent outages on different ISPs
On April 23 and 24, there was a more significant outage affecting multiple ISPs (and their ASNs or autonomous systems) that brought Internet traffic in the country, as the previous chart clearly shows, even lower. There was no official reason given for those major disruptions that had a nationwide impact. That said, the disruptions were also felt in neighbor country Chad in several ISPs, given that Sudan’s Sudatel (AS15706) seems to be an upstream provider.
Cloudflare saw a 74% decrease in traffic on Sunday, April 23, compared to Sunday, April 9, before the conflict, and a 70% drop on Monday, April 24, compared with Monday, April 10. In some ISPs, the impact was bigger.
In the news, ISP MTN (AS36972) reportedly blocked Internet services on April 16, and, according to Reuters, was told by the authorities to restore it a few hours after. We saw a clear outage in that ASN, an almost 90% drop in traffic compared with previous weeks for about 10 hours, after 00:00 UTC on April 16, and it mostly recovered after 10:00 UTC.
The most impacted ISPs were Sudatel (AS15706), Zain (AS36998), and Canar (AS33788) with almost complete outages. Canar was the outage that lasted the longest, with 83 hours, from April 21 to 25. Next, it was the main ISP in the country, Sudatel, with 40 hours of almost complete Internet blackout, followed by Zain, with 10 hours on April 24.
The return of traffic coincided with the time a nationwide ceasefire of 72 hours was agreed upon on April 24.
BGP or Border Gateway Protocol is a mechanism to exchange routing information between networks on the Internet, and a crucial part that enables the existence of the network of networks (the Internet). BGP announcements or updates can signal disruption in connectivity or outages, as we saw in Canada in 2022 with Rogers ISP or in the UK in 2023 with Virgin Media, for example. In this case, highlighted in the next chart, BGP updates biggest spikes from Sudatel (AS15706) are consistent with both the start of the outage, and the return to traffic.
Mobile device traffic percentage grew after April 15
Sudan is typically one of the countries with the highest percentage of mobile device traffic in the world. We’ve written about this in the past (see the 2021 mobile device traffic blog post), and at the time the average was 83%. Observing data from the past week, as seen on our Cloudflare Radar traffic worldwide page, Sudan leads our ranking with 88% of traffic coming from mobile devices.
Looking at the past few weeks, we can see mobile device traffic growing as a percentage of all Internet traffic in Sudan. The April 3 week showed a lower percentage than it is now, with 77% (23% was desktop traffic percentage). In the April 10 week, which includes April 15 and 16, mobile device traffic rose to 80%. In the week of April 17, it was 85%, and the week of April 24, it’s 88%.
How is Internet traffic holding up more recently in Sudan? Looking at a week-over-week hourly comparison, traffic last Friday was still around 55% lower than before April 15, and on May 2, traffic is still around 30% lower than pre-conflict levels (April 11).
In the previous chart, there’s a regular drop in traffic observed at around 16:00 UTC, ~18:00 local time. It’s more evident before April 15, but it generally continues after that. That drop in traffic is consistent with Ramadan trends we discussed recently in a blog post. It is related to the Iftar, the first meal after sunset that breaks the fast and often serves as a family or community event — sunset in Khartoum, Sudan, is at 18:07.
As of this Tuesday, Internet traffic data (from a linear perspective) shows that traffic continues to be much lower than before, and this morning at 08:00 UTC it is ~30% lower than it was three weeks ago (pre-conflict), at the same time, showing some recovery in the past couple of days.
According to the BBC, reporting from Sudan, the Internet continues to be impacted, an observation that is consistent with our data.
Looking more closely at Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, where most people live and the conflict began, traffic was impacted after April 15 (the blue line in the next chart). On April 27, Internet traffic was around 76% lower than it was on the same pre-conflict weekday (April 13). The next chart also shows the typical drop around 18:00, for Ramadan’s Iftar, the first meal after sunset.
Changes in messaging and social media trends
Looking at DNS queries (from Cloudflare’s resolver) to websites or domains in Sudan, we saw a clear shift from the use of WhatsApp-related domains for messaging to Signal ones after April 15 — the drop in DNS traffic to WhatsApp was similar to the increase in DNS traffic to Signal domains.
Social media platforms such as LinkedIn, but also TikTok or YouTube, had a clear decrease since April 15. On the other hand, Facebook and Twitter saw an increase, especially on April 15 and 16, with some disruptions (possibly related to Internet access), but with bigger spikes than before, usually at night, since then. Here’s the aggregated view to social media platforms:
Conclusion: ongoing impact
The conflict in Sudan continues, and so does its Internet traffic impact. We will continue to monitor the Internet situation on Cloudflare Radar, where you can check Sudan’s country page and the Outage Center.
Welcome to the first DDoS threat report of 2023. DDoS attacks, or distributed denial-of-service attacks, are a type of cyber attack that aim to overwhelm Internet services such as websites with more traffic than they can handle, in order to disrupt them and make them unavailable to legitimate users. In this report, we cover the latest insights and trends about the DDoS attack landscape as we observed across our global network.
Kicking off 2023 with a bang
Threat actors kicked off 2023 with a bang. The start of the year was characterized by a series of hacktivist campaigns against Western targets including banking, airports, healthcare and universities — mainly by the pro-Russian Telegram-organized groups Killnet and more recently by AnonymousSudan.
While Killnet-led and AnonymousSudan-led cyberattacks stole the spotlight, we haven’t witnessed any novel or exceedingly large attacks by them.
Hyper-volumetric attacks
We did see, however, an increase of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks launched by other threat actors — with the largest one peaking above 71 million requests per second (rps) — exceeding Google’s previous world record of 46M rps by 55%.
Back to Killnet and AnonymousSudan, while no noteworthy attacks were reported, we shouldn’t underestimate the potential risks. Unprotected Internet properties can still be, and have been, taken down by Killnet-led or AnonymousSudan-led cyber campaigns. Organizations should take proactive defensive measures to reduce the risks.
Business as usual for South American Telco targeted by terabit-strong attacks thanks to Cloudflare
Another large attack we saw in Q1 was a 1.3 Tbps (terabits per second) DDoS attack that targeted a South American Telecommunications provider. The attack lasted only a minute. It was a multi-vector attack involving DNS and UDP attack traffic. The attack was part of a broader campaign which included multiple Terbit-strong attacks originating from a 20,000-strong Mirai-variant botnet. Most of the attack traffic originated from the US, Brazil, Japan, Hong Kong, and India. Cloudflare systems automatically detected and mitigated it without any impact to the customer’s networks.
Cloudflare auto-mitigates a 1.3 Tbps Mirai DDoS attack
High-performance botnets
Hyper-volumetric attacks leverage a new generation of botnets that are comprised of Virtual Private Servers (VPS) instead of Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Historically, large botnets relied on exploitable IoT devices such as smart security cameras to orchestrate their attacks. Despite the limited throughput of each IoT device, together — usually numbering in the hundreds of thousands or millions — they generated enough traffic to disrupt their targets.
The new generation of botnets uses a fraction of the amount of devices, but each device is substantially stronger. Cloud computing providers offer virtual private servers to allow start ups and businesses to create performant applications. The downside is that it also allows attackers to create high-performance botnets that can be as much as 5,000x stronger. Attackers gain access to virtual private servers by compromising unpatched servers and hacking into management consoles using leaked API credentials.
Cloudflare has been working with key cloud computing providers to crack down on these VPS-based botnets. Substantial portions of such botnets have been disabled thanks to the cloud computing providers’ rapid response and diligence. Since then, we have yet to see additional hyper-volumetric attacks — a testament to the fruitful collaboration.
We have excellent collaboration with the cyber-security community to take down botnets once we detect such large-scale attacks, but we want to make this process even simpler and more automated.
We invite Cloud computing providers, hosting providers and general service providers to sign up for Cloudflare’s free Botnet Threat Feed to gain visibility on attacks launching from within their networks — and help us dismantle botnets.
Key highlights from this quarter
In Q1, 16% of surveyed customers reported a Ransom DDoS attack — remains steady compared to the previous quarter but represents a 60% increase YoY.
Non-profit organizations and Broadcast Media were two of the most targeted industries. Finland was the largest source of HTTP DDoS attacks in terms of percentage of attack traffic, and the main target of network-layer DDoS attacks. Israel was the top most attacked country worldwide by HTTP DDoS attacks.
Large scale volumetric DDoS attacks — attacks above 100 Gbps — increased by 6% QoQ. DNS-based attacks became the most popular vector. Similarly, we observed surges in SPSS-bas in ed DDoS attacks, DNS amplification attacks, and GRE-based DDoS attacks.
Ransom DDoS attacks
Often, DDoS attacks are carried out to extort ransom payments. We continue to survey Cloudflare customers and track the ratio of DDoS events where the target received a ransom note. This number has been steadily rising through 2022 and currently stands at 16% – the same as in Q4 2022.
Percent of users reporting a Ransom DDoS attack or threat, per quarter
As opposed to Ransomware attacks, where usually the victim is tricked into downloading a file or clicking on an email link that encrypts and locks their computer files until they pay a ransom fee, Ransom DDoS attacks can be much easier for attackers to execute. Ransom DDoS attacks don’t require tricking the victim into opening an email or clicking a link, nor do they require a network intrusion or a foothold into the corporate assets.
In a Ransom DDoS attack, the attacker doesn’t need access to the victim’s computer but rather just needs to bombard them with a sufficiently large amount of traffic to take down their websites, DNS servers, and any other type of Internet-connected property to make it unavailable or with poor performance to users. The attacker will demand a ransom payment, usually in the form of Bitcoin, to stop and/or avoid further attacks.
The months of January 2023 and March 2023 were the second highest in terms of Ransom DDoS activity as reported by our users. The highest month thus far remains November 2022 — the month of Black Friday, Thanksgiving, and Singles Day in China — a lucrative month for threat actors.
Percent of users reporting a Ransom DDoS attack or threat, per month
Who and what are being attacked?
Top targeted countries
Perhaps related to the judicial reform and opposing protests, in Q1, Israel jumps to the first place as the country targeted by the most HTTP DDoS attack traffic — even above the United States of America. This is an astonishing figure. Just short of a single percent of all HTTP traffic that Cloudflare processed in the first quarter of the year, was part of HTTP DDoS attacks that targeted Israeli websites. Following closely behind Israel are the US, Canada, and Turkey.
Top countries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic worldwide)
In terms of the percentage of attack traffic compared to all traffic to a given country, Slovenia and Georgia came at the top. Approximately 20% of all traffic to Slovenian and Georgian websites were HTTP DDoS attacks. Next in line were the small Caribbean dual-island nation, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Turkey. While Israel was the top in the previous graph, here it has found its placement as the ninth most attacked country — above Russia. Still high compared to previous quarters.
Top countries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic per country)
Looking at the total amount of network-layer DDoS attack traffic, China came in first place. Almost 18% of all network-layer DDoS attack traffic came from China. Closely in second, Singapore came in second place with a 17% share. The US came in third, followed by Finland.
Top countries targeted by network-layer DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the all DDoS traffic worldwide)
When we normalize attacks to a country by all traffic to that country, Finland jumps to the first place, perhaps due to its newly approved NATO membership. Nearly 83% of all traffic to Finland was network-layer attack traffic. China followed closely with 68% and Singapore again with 49%.
Top countries targeted by network-layer DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the all traffic per country)
Top targeted industries
In terms of overall bandwidth, globally, Internet companies saw the largest amount of HTTP DDoS attack traffic. Afterwards, it was the Marketing and Advertising industry, Computer Software industry, Gaming / Gambling and Telecommunications.
Top industries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic for all industries)
By percentage of attack traffic out of total traffic to an industry, Non-profits were the most targeted in the first quarter of the year, followed by Accounting firms. Despite the uptick of attacks on healthcare, it didn’t make it into the top ten. Also up there in the top were Chemicals, Government, and Energy Utilities & Waste industries. Looking at the US, almost 2% of all traffic to US Federal websites were part of DDoS attacks.
Top industries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic per industry)
On a regional scale, the Gaming & Gambling industry was the most targeted in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. In South and Central America, the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) industry was the most targeted. In North America it was the Marketing & Advertising industry followed by Telecommunications — which was also the most attacked industry in Africa. Last by not least, in Oceania, the Health, Wellness and Fitness industry was the most targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks.
Diving lower in the OSI stack, based on the total volume of L3/4 attack traffic, the most targeted industries were Information Technology and Services, Gaming / Gambling, and Telecommunications.
Top industries targeted by L3/4 DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total DDoS traffic for all industries)
When comparing the attack traffic to the total traffic per industry, we see a different picture. Almost every second byte transmitted to Broadcast Media companies was L3/4 DDoS attack traffic.
Top industries targeted by L3/4 DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic per industry)
Where attacks are coming from
Top source countries
In the first quarter of 2023, Finland was the largest source of HTTP DDoS attacks in terms of the percentage of attack traffic out of all traffic per country. Closely after Finland, the British Virgin Islands came in second place, followed by Libya and Barbados.
Top source countries of HTTP DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic per country)
In terms of absolute volumes, the most HTTP DDoS attack traffic came from US IP addresses. China came in second, followed by Germany, Indonesia, Brazil, and Finland.
Top source countries of HTTP DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic worldwide)
On the L3/4 side of things, Vietnam was the largest source of L3/4 DDoS attack traffic. Almost a third of all L3/4 traffic we ingested in our Vietnam data centers was attack traffic. Following Vietnam were Paraguay, Moldova, and Jamaica.
Top source countries of L3/4 DDoS attacks (percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic per country)
What attack types and sizes we see
Attack size and duration
When looking at the types of attacks that are launched against our customers and our own network and applications, we can see that the majority of attacks are short and small; 86% of network-layer DDoS attacks end within 10 minutes, and 91% of attacks never exceed 500 Mbps.
Network-layer DDoS attacks by duration
Only one out of every fifty attacks ever exceeds 10 Gbps, and only one out of every thousand attacks exceeds 100 Gbps.
Network-layer DDoS attacks by bitrate
Having said that, larger attacks are slowly increasing in quantity and frequency. Last quarter, attacks exceeding 100 Gbps saw a 67% increase QoQ in their quantity. This quarter, the growth has slowed down a bit to 6%, but it’s still growing. In fact, there was an increase in all volumetric attacks excluding the ‘small’ bucket where the majority fall into — as visualized in the graph below. The largest growth was in the 10-100 Gbps range; an 89% increase QoQ.
Network-layer DDoS attacks by size: quarter-over-quarter change
Attack vectors
This quarter we saw a tectonic shift. With a 22% share, SYN floods scooched to the second place, making DNS-based DDoS attacks the most popular attack vector (30%). Almost a third of all L3/4 DDoS attacks were DNS-based; either DNS floods or DNS amplification/reflection attacks. Not far behind, UDP-based attacks came in third with a 21% share.
Top DDoS attack vectors
Emerging threats
Every quarter we see the reemergence of old and sometimes even ancient attack vectors. What this tells us is that even decade-old vulnerabilities are still being exploited to launch attacks. Threat actors are recycling and reusing old methods — perhaps hoping that organizations have dropped those protections against older methods.
In the first quarter of 2023, there was a massive surge in SPSS-based DDoS attacks, DNS amplification attacks and GRE-based DDoS attacks.
Top DDoS emerging threats
SPSS-based DDoS attacks increased by 1,565% QoQ
The Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS) is an IBM-developed software suite for use cases such as data management, business intelligence, and criminal investigation. The Sentinel RMS License Manager server is used to manage licensing for software products such as the IBM SPSS system. Back in 2021, two vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-22713 and CVE-2021-38153) were identified in the Sentinel RMS License Manager server which can be used to launch reflection DDoS attacks. Attackers can send large amounts of specially crafted license requests to the server, causing it to generate a response that is much larger than the original request. This response is sent back to the victim’s IP address, effectively amplifying the size of the attack and overwhelming the victim’s network with traffic. This type of attack is known as a reflection DDoS attack, and it can cause significant disruption to the availability of software products that rely on the Sentinel RMS License Manager, such as IBM SPSS Statistics. Applying the available patches to the license manager is essential to prevent these vulnerabilities from being exploited and to protect against reflection DDoS attacks.
DNS amplification DDoS attacks increased by 958% QoQ
DNS amplification attacks are a type of DDoS attack that involves exploiting vulnerabilities in the Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure to generate large amounts of traffic directed at a victim’s network. Attackers send DNS requests to open DNS resolvers that have been misconfigured to allow recursive queries from any source, and use these requests to generate responses that are much larger than the original query. The attackers then spoof the victim’s IP address, causing the large responses to be directed at the victim’s network, overwhelming it with traffic and causing a denial of service. The challenge of mitigating DNS amplification attacks is that the attack traffic can be difficult to distinguish from legitimate traffic, making it difficult to block at the network level. To mitigate DNS amplification attacks, organizations can take steps such as properly configuring DNS resolvers, implementing rate-limiting techniques, and using traffic filtering tools to block traffic from known attack sources.
GRE-based DDoS attacks increased by 835% QoQ
GRE-based DDoS attacks involve using the Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE) protocol to flood a victim’s network with large amounts of traffic. Attackers create multiple GRE tunnels between compromised hosts to send traffic to the victim’s network. These attacks are difficult to detect and filter, as the traffic appears as legitimate traffic on the victim’s network. Attackers can also use source IP address spoofing to make it appear that the traffic is coming from legitimate sources, making it difficult to block at the network level. GRE-based DDoS attacks pose several risks to targeted organizations, including downtime, disruption of business operations, and potential data theft or network infiltration. Mitigating these attacks requires the use of advanced traffic filtering tools that can detect and block attack traffic based on its characteristics, as well as techniques such as rate limiting and source IP address filtering to block traffic from known attack sources.
The DDoS threat landscape
In recent months, there has been an increase in longer and larger DDoS attacks across various industries, with volumetric attacks being particularly prominent. Non-profit and Broadcast Media companies were some of the top targeted industries. DNS DDoS attacks also became increasingly prevalent.
As DDoS attacks are typically carried out by bots, automated detection and mitigation are crucial for effective defense. Cloudflare’s automated systems provide constant protection against DDoS attacks for our customers, allowing them to focus on other aspects of their business. We believe that DDoS protection should be easily accessible to organizations of all sizes, and have been offering free and unlimited protection since 2017.
At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet — one that is more secure and faster Internet for all.
We invite you to join our DDoS Trends Webinar to learn more about emerging threats and effective defense strategies.
A note about methodologies
How we calculate Ransom DDoS attack insights Cloudflare’s systems constantly analyze traffic and automatically apply mitigation when DDoS attacks are detected. Each attacked 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, Cloudflare has been surveying attacked customers. One of the questions in the survey asks the respondents if they received a threat or a ransom note. Over the past two years, on average, we collected 164 responses per quarter. The responses of this survey are used to calculate the percentage of Ransom DDoS attacks.
How we calculate geographical and industry insights Source country At the application-layer, we use the attacking IP addresses to understand the origin country of the attacks. That is because at that layer, IP addresses cannot be spoofed (i.e., altered). However, at the network layer, source IP addresses can be spoofed. So, instead of relying on IP addresses to understand the source, we instead use the location of our data centers where the attack packets were ingested. We’re able to get geographical accuracy due to our large global coverage in over 285 locations around the world.
Target country For both application-layer and network-layer DDoS attacks, we group attacks and traffic by our customers’ billing country. This lets us understand which countries are subject to more attacks.
Target industry For both application-layer and network-layer DDoS attacks, we group attacks and traffic by our customers’ industry according to our customer relations management system. This lets us understand which industries are subject to more attacks.
Total volume vs. percentage For both source and target insights, we look at the total volume of attack traffic compared to all traffic as one data point. Additionally, we also look at the percentage of attack traffic towards or from a specific country, to a specific country or to a specific industry. This gives us an “attack activity rate” for a given country/industry which is normalized by their total traffic levels. This helps us remove biases of a country or industry that normally receives a lot of traffic and therefore a lot of attack traffic as well.
How we calculate attack characteristics To calculate the attack size, duration, attack vectors and emerging threats, we bucket attacks and then provide the share of each bucket out of the total amount for each dimension.
General disclaimer and clarification When we describe ‘top countries’ as the source or target of attacks, it does not necessarily mean that that country was attacked as a country, but rather that organizations that use that country as their billing country were targeted by attacks. Similarly, attacks originating from a country does not mean that that country launched the attacks, but rather that the attack was launched from IP addresses that have been mapped to that country. Threat actors operate global botnets with nodes all over the world, and in many cases also use Virtual Private Networks and proxies to obfuscate their true location. So if anything, the source country could indicate the presence of exit nodes or botnet nodes within that country.
Just after midnight (UTC) on April 4, subscribers to UK ISP Virgin Media (AS5089) began experiencing an Internet outage, with subscriber complaints multiplying rapidly on platforms including Twitter and Reddit.
Cloudflare Radar data shows Virgin Media traffic dropping to near-zero around 00:30 UTC, as seen in the figure below. Connectivity showed some signs of recovery around 02:30 UTC, but fell again an hour later. Further nominal recovery was seen around 04:45 UTC, before again experiencing another complete outage between around 05:45-06:45 UTC, after which traffic began to recover, reaching expected levels around 07:30 UTC.
After the initial set of early-morning disruptions, Virgin Media experienced another round of issues in the afternoon. Cloudflare observed instability in traffic from Virgin Media’s network (called an autonomous system in Internet jargon) AS5089 starting around 15:00 UTC, with a significant drop just before 16:00 UTC. However in this case, it did not appear to be a complete outage, with traffic recovering approximately a half hour later.
Virgin Media’s Twitter account acknowledged the early morning disruption several hours after it began, posting responses stating “We’re aware of an issue that is affecting broadband services for Virgin Media customers as well as our contact centres. Our teams are currently working to identify and fix the problem as quickly as possible and we apologise to those customers affected.” Further responses after service restoration noted “We’ve restored broadband services for customers but are closely monitoring the situation as our engineers continue to investigate. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
However, the second disruption was acknowledged on Virgin Media’s Twitter account much more rapidly, with a post at 16:25 UTC stating “Unfortunately we have seen a repeat of an earlier issue which is causing intermittent broadband connectivity problems for some Virgin Media customers. We apologise again to those impacted, our teams are continuing to work flat out to find the root cause of the problem and fix it.”
At the time of the outages, www.virginmedia.com, which includes the provider’s status page, was unavailable. As seen in the figure below, a DNS lookup for the hostname resulted in a SERVFAIL error, indicating that the lookup failed to return a response. This is because the authoritative nameservers for virginmedia.com are listed as ns{1-4}.virginmedia.net, and these nameservers are all hosted within Virgin Media’s network (AS5089) and thus are not accessible during the outage.
Although Virgin Media has not publicly released a root cause for the series of disruptions that its network has experienced, looking at BGP activity can be instructive.
BGP is a mechanism to exchange routing information between networks on the Internet. The big routers that make the Internet work have huge, constantly updated lists of the possible routes that can be used to deliver each network packet to its final destination. Without BGP, the Internet routers wouldn’t know what to do, and the Internet wouldn’t exist.
The Internet is literally a network of networks, or for math fans, a graph, with each individual network a node in it, and the edges representing the interconnections. All of this is bound together by BGP, which allows one network (Virgin Media, for instance) to advertise its presence to other networks that form the Internet. When Virgin Media is not advertising its presence, other networks can’t find its network and it becomes effectively unavailable.
BGP announcements inform a router of changes made to the routing of a prefix (a group of IP addresses) or entirely withdraws the prefix, removing it from the routing table. The figure below shows aggregate BGP announcement activity from AS5089 with spikes that align with the decreases and increases seen in the traffic graph above, suggesting that the underlying cause may in fact be BGP-related, or related to problems with core network infrastructure.
We can drill down further to break out the observed activity between BGP announcements (dark blue) and withdrawals (light blue) seen in the figure below, with key activity coincident with the loss and return of traffic. An initial set of withdrawals are seen just after midnight, effectively removing Virgin Media from the Internet resulting in the initial outage.
A set of announcements occurred just before 03:00 UTC, aligning with the nominal increase in traffic noted above, but those were followed quickly by another set of withdrawals. A similar announcement/withdrawal exchange was observed at 05:00 and 05:30 UTC respectively, before a final set of announcements restored connectivity at 07:00 UTC.
Things remained relatively stable through the morning into the afternoon, before another set of withdrawals presaged the afternoon’s connectivity problems, with a spike of withdrawals at 15:00 UTC, followed by additional withdrawal/announcement exchanges over the next several hours.
The Internet has become a significant factor in geopolitical conflicts, such as the ongoing war in Ukraine. Tomorrow marks one year since the Russian invasion of that country. This post reports on Internet insights and discusses how Ukraine’s Internet remained resilient in spite of dozens of disruptions in three different stages of the conflict.
Key takeaways:
Internet traffic shifts in Ukraine are clearly visible from east to west as Ukrainians fled the war, with country-wide traffic dropping as much as 33% after February 24, 2022.
Air strikes on energy infrastructure starting in October led to widespread Internet disruptions that continue in 2023.
Application-layer cyber attacks in Ukraine rose 1,300% in early March 2022 compared to pre-war levels.
Government administration, financial services, and the media saw the most attacks targeting Ukraine.
Traffic from a number of networks in Kherson was re-routed through Russia between June and October, subjecting traffic to Russia’s restrictions and limitations, including content filtering. Even after traffic ceased to reroute through Russia, those Ukrainian networks saw major outages through at least the end of the year, while two networks remain offline.
Through efforts on the ground to repair damaged fiber optics and restore electrical power, Ukraine’s networks have remained resilient from both an infrastructure and routing perspective. This is partly due to Ukraine’s widespread connectivity to networks outside the country and large number of IXPs.
Starlink traffic in Ukraine grew over 500% between mid-March and mid-May, and continued to grow from mid-May through mid-November, increasing nearly 300% over that six-month period. For the full period from mid-March (two weeks after it was made available) to mid-December, it was over a 1,600% increase, dropping a bit after that.
Internet changes and disruptions
An Internet shock after February 24, 2022
In Ukraine, human Internet traffic dropped as much as 33% in the weeks following February 24. The following chart shows Cloudflare’s perspective on daily traffic (by number of requests).
Internet traffic levels recovered over the next few months, including strong growth seen in September and October, when many Ukrainian refugees returned to the country. That said, there were also country-wide outages, mostly after October, that are discussed below.
14% of total traffic from Ukraine (including traffic from Crimea and other occupied regions) was mitigated as potential attacks, while 10% of total traffic to Ukraine was mitigated as potential attacks in the last 12 months.
Before February 24, 2022, typical weekday Internet traffic in Ukraine initially peaked after lunch, around 15:00 local time, dropped between 17:00 and 18:00 (consistent with people leaving work), and reached the biggest peak of the day at around 21:00 (possibly after dinner for mobile and streaming use).
After the invasion started, we observed less variation during the day in a clear change in the usual pattern given the reported disruption and “exodus” from the country. During the first few days after the invasion began, peak traffic occurred around 19:00, at a time when nights for many in cities such as Kyiv were spent in improvised underground bunkers. By late March, the 21:00 peak had returned, but the early evening drop in traffic did not return until May.
When looking at Ukraine Internet requests by type of trafficin the chart below (from February 10, 2022, through February 2023), we observe that while traffic from both mobile and desktop devices dropped after the invasion, request volume from mobile devices has remained higher over the past year. Pre-war, mobile devices accounted for around 53% of traffic, and grew to around 60% during the first weeks of the invasion. By late April, it had returned to typical pre-war levels, falling back to around 54% of traffic. There’s also a noticeable December drop/outage that we’ll go over below.
Millions moving from east to west in Ukraine
The invasion brought attacks and failing infrastructure across a number of cities, but the target in the early days wasn’t the country’s energy infrastructure, as it was in October 2022. In the first weeks of the war, Internet traffic changes were largely driven by people evacuating conflict zones with their families. Over eight million Ukrainians left the country in the first three months, and many more relocated internally to safer cities, although many returned during the summer of 2022. The Internet played a critical role during this refugee crisis, supporting communications and access to real-time information that could save lives, as well as apps providing services, among others.
There was also an increase in traffic in the western part of Ukraine, in areas such as Lviv (further away from the conflict areas), and a decrease in the east, in areas like Kharkiv, where the Russian military was arriving and attacks were a constant threat. The figure below provides a view of how Internet traffic across Ukraine changed in the week after the war began (a darker pink means a drop in traffic — as much as 60% — while a darker green indicates an increase in Internet traffic — as much as 50%).
The biggest drops in Internet traffic observed in Ukraine in the first days of the war were in Kharkiv Oblast in the east, and Chernihiv in the north, both with a 60% decrease, followed by Kyiv Oblast, with traffic 40% lower on March 2, 2022, as compared with February 23.
In western Ukraine, traffic surged. The regions with the highest observed traffic growth included Rivne (50%), Volyn (30%), Lviv (28%), Chernivtsi (25%), and Zakarpattia (15%).
At the city level, analysis of Internet traffic in Ukraine gives us some insight into usage of the Internet and availability of Internet access in those first weeks, with noticeable outages in places where direct conflict was going on or that was already occupied by Russian soldiers.
North of Kyiv, the city of Chernihiv had a significant drop in traffic the first week of the war and residual traffic by mid-March, with traffic picking up only after the Russians retreated in early April.
In the capital city of Kyiv, there is a clear disruption in Internet traffic right after the war started, possibly caused by people leaving, attacks and use of underground shelters.
Near Kyiv, we observed a clear outage in early March in Bucha. After April 1, when the Russians withdrew, Internet traffic started to come back a few weeks later.
In Irpin, just outside Kyiv, close to the Hostomel airport and Bucha, a similar outage pattern to Bucha was observed. Traffic only began to come back more clearly in late May.
In the east, in the city of Kharkiv, traffic dropped 50% on March 3, with a similar scenario seen not far away in Sumy. The disruption was related to people leaving and also by power outages affecting some networks.
Other cities in the south of Ukraine, like Berdyansk, had outages. This graph shows Enerhodar, the small city where Europe’s largest nuclear plant, Zaporizhzhya NPP, is located, with residual traffic compared to before.
In the cities located in the south of Ukraine, there were clear Internet disruptions. The Russians laid siege to Mariupol on February 24. Energy infrastructure strikes and shutdowns had an impact on local networks and Internet traffic, which fell to minimal levels by March 1. Estimates indicate that 95% of the buildings in the city were destroyed, and by mid-May, the city was fully under Russian control. While there was some increase in traffic by the end of April, it reached only ~22% of what it was before the war’s start.
When looking at Ukrainian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or the autonomous systems (ASNs) they use, we observed more localized disruptions in certain regions during the first months of the war, but recovery was almost always swift. AS6849 (Ukrtel) experienced problems with very short-term outages in mid-March. AS13188 (Triolan), which services Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv, was another provider experiencing problems (they reported a cyberattack on March 9), as could be observed in the next chart:
We did not observe a clear national outage in Ukraine’s main ISP, AS15895 (Kyivstar) until the October-November attacks on energy infrastructure, which also shows some early resilience of Ukrainian networks.
Ukraine’s counteroffensive and its Internet impact
As Russian troops retreated from the northern front in Ukraine, they shifted their efforts to gain ground in the east (Battle of Donbas) and south (occupation of the Kherson region) after late April. This resulted in Internet disruptions and traffic shifts, which are discussed in more detail in a section below. However, Internet traffic in the Kherson region was intermittent and included outages after May, given the battle for Internet control. News reports in June revealed that ISP workers damaged their own equipment to thwart Russia’s efforts to control the Ukrainian Internet.
Before the September Ukrainian counteroffensive, another example of the war’s impact on a city’s Internet traffic occurred during the summer, when Russian troops seized Lysychansk in eastern Ukraine in early July after what became known as the Battle of Lysychansk. Internet traffic in Lysychansk clearly decreased after the war started. That slide continues during the intense fighting that took place after April, which led to most of the city’s population leaving. By May, traffic was almost residual (with a mid-May few days short term increase).
In early September the Ukrainian counteroffensive took off in the east, although the media initially reported a south offensive in Kherson Oblast that was a “deception” move. The Kherson offensive only came to fruition in late October and early November. Ukraine was able to retake in September over 500 settlements and 12,000 square kilometers of territory in the Kharkiv region. At that time, there were Internet outages in several of those settlements.
In response to the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive, Russian airstrikes caused power outages and Internet disruptions in the region. That was the case in Kharkiv on September 11, 12, and 13. The figure below shows a 12-hour near-complete outage on September 11, followed by two other periods of drop in traffic.
When nuclear inspectors arrive, so do Internet outages
In the Zaporizhzhia region, there were also outages. On September 1, 2022, the day the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors arrived at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Enerhodar, there were Internet outages in two local ASNs that service the area: AS199560 (Engrup) and AS197002(OOO Tenor). Those outages lasted until September 10, as shown in the charts below.
More broadly, the city of Enerhodar, where the nuclear power plant is located, experienced a four-day outage after September 6.
Mid-September traffic drop in Crimea
In mid-September, following Ukraine’s counteroffensive, there were questions as to when Crimea might be targeted by Ukrainian forces, with news reports indicating that there was an evacuation of the Russian population from Crimea around September 13. We saw a clear drop in traffic on that Tuesday, compared with the previous day, as seen in the map of Crimea below (red is decrease in traffic, green is increase).
October brings energy infrastructure attacks and country-wide disruptions
As we have seen, the Russian air strikes targeting critical energy infrastructure began in September as a retaliation to Ukraine’s counteroffensive. The following month, the Crimean Bridge explosion on Saturday, October 8 (when a truck-borne bomb destroyed part of the bridge) led to more air strikes that affected networks and Internet traffic across Ukraine.
On Monday, October 10, Ukraine woke up to air strikes on energy infrastructure and experienced severe electricity and Internet outages. At 07:35 UTC, traffic in the country was 35% below its usual level compared with the previous week and only fully recovered more than 24 hours later. The impact was particularly significant in regions like Kharkiv, where traffic was down by around 80%, and Lviv, where it dropped by about 60%. The graph below shows how new air strikes in Lviv Oblast the following day affected Internet traffic.
There were clear disruptions in Internet connectivity in several regions on October 17, but also on October 20, when the destruction of several power stations in Kyiv resulted in a 25% drop in Internet traffic from Kyiv City as compared to the two previous weeks. It lasted 12 hours, and was followed the next day by a shorter partial outage as seen in the graph below.
In late October, according to Ukrainian officials, 30% of Ukraine’s power stations were destroyed. Self-imposed power limitations because of this destruction resulted in drops in Internet traffic observed in places like Kyiv and the surrounding region.
The start of a multi-week Internet disruption in Kherson Oblast can be seen in the graph below, showing ~70% lower traffic than in previous weeks. The disruption began on Saturday, October 22, when Ukrainians were gaining ground in the Kherson region.
Traffic began to return after Ukrainian forces took Kherson city on November 11, 2022. The graph below shows a week-over-week comparison for Kherson Oblast for the weeks of November 7, November 28, and December 19 for better visualization in the chart while showing the evolution through a seven-week period.
Ongoing strikes and Internet disruptions
Throughout the rest of the year and into 2023, Ukraine has continued to face intermittent Internet disruptions. On November 23, 2022, the country experienced widespread power outages after Russian strikes, causing a nearly 50% decrease in Internet traffic in Ukraine. This disruption lasted for almost a day and a half, further emphasizing the ongoing impact of the conflict on Ukraine’s infrastructure.
Although there was a recovery after that late November outage, only a few days later traffic seemed closer to normal levels. Below is a chart of the week-over-week evolution of Internet traffic in Ukraine at both a national and local level during that time:
In Kyiv Oblast:
In the Odessa region:
And Kharkiv (where a December 16 outage is also clear — in the green line):
On December 16, there was another country-level Internet disruption caused by air strikes targeting energy infrastructure. Traffic at a national level dropped as much as 13% compared with the previous week, but Ukrainian networks were even more affected. AS13188 (Triolan) had a 70% drop in traffic, and AS15895 (Kyivstar) a 40% drop, both shown in the figures below.
In January 2023, air strikes caused additional Internet disruptions. One such recent event was in Odessa, where traffic dropped as low as 54% compared with the previous week during an 18-hour disruption.
A cyber war with global impact
“Shields Up” on cyber attacks
The US government and the FBI issued warnings in March to all citizens, businesses, and organizations in the country, as well as allies and partners, to be aware of the need to “enhance cybersecurity.” The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) launched the Shields Up initiative, noting that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could impact organizations both within and beyond the region.” The UK and Japan, among others, also issued warnings.
Below, we discuss Web Application Firewall (WAF) mitigations and DDoS attacks. A WAF helps protect web applications by filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic between a web application and the Internet. A WAF is a protocol layer 7 defense (in the OSI model), and is not designed to defend against all types of attacks. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are cyber attacks that aim to take down Internet properties and make them unavailable for users.
Cyber attacks rose 1,300% in Ukraine by early March
The charts below are based on normalized data, and show threats mitigated by our WAF.
Mitigated application-layer threats blocked by our WAF skyrocketed after the war started on February 24. Mitigated requests were 105% higher on Monday, February 28 than in the previous (pre-war) Monday, and peaked on March 8, reaching 1,300% higher than pre-war levels.
Between February 2022 and February 2023, an average of 10% of all traffic to Ukraine was mitigations of potential attacks.
The graph below shows the daily percentage of application layer traffic to Ukraine that Cloudflare mitigated as potential attacks. In early March, 30% of all traffic was mitigated. This fell in April, and remained low for several months, but it picked up in early September around the time of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in east and south Ukraine. The peak was reached on October 29 when DDoS attack traffic constituted 39% of total traffic to Cloudflare’s Ukrainian customer websites.
This trend is more evident when looking at all traffic to sites on the “.ua” top-level domain (from Cloudflare’s perspective). The chart below shows that DDoS attack traffic accounted for over 80% of all traffic by early March 2022. The first clear spikes occurred on February 16 and 19, with around 25% of traffic mitigated. There was no moment of rest after the war started, except towards the end of November and December, but the attacks resumed just before Christmas. An average of 13% of all traffic to “.ua”, between February 2022 and February 2023 was mitigations of potential attacks. The following graph provides a comprehensive view of DDoS application layer attacks on “.ua” sites:
Moving on to types of mitigations of product groups that were used (related to “.ua” sites), as seen in the next chart, around 57% were done by the ruleset which automatically detects and mitigates HTTP DDoS attacks (DDoS Mitigation), 31% were being mitigated by firewall rules put in place (WAF), and 10% were blocking requests based on our IP threat reputation database (IP Reputation).
It’s important to note that WAF rules in the graph above are also associated with custom firewall rules created by customers to provide a more tailored protection. “DDoS Mitigation” (application layer DDoS protection) and “Access Rules” (rate limiting) are specifically used for DDoS protection.
In contrast to the first graph shown in this section, which looked at mitigated attack traffic targeting Ukraine, we can also look at mitigated attack traffic originating in Ukraine. The graph below also shows that the share of mitigated traffic from Ukraine also increased considerably after the invasion started.
Top attacked industries: from government to news media
The industries sectors that had a higher share of WAF mitigations were government administration, financial services, and the media, representing almost half of all WAF mitigations targeting Ukraine during 2022.
Looking at DDoS attacks, there was a surge in attacks on media and publishing companies during 2022 in Ukraine. Entities targeting Ukrainian companies appeared to be focused on information-related websites. The top five most attacked industries in the Ukraine in the first two quarters of 2022 were all in broadcasting, Internet, online media, and publishing, accounting for almost 80% of all DDoS attacks targeting Ukraine.
In a more focused look at the type of websites Cloudflare has protected throughout the war, the next two graphs provide a view of mitigated application layer attacks by the type of “.ua” sites we helped to protect. In the first days of the war, mitigation spikes were observed at a news service, a TV channel, a government website, and a bank.
In July, spikes in mitigations we observed across other types of “.ua” websites, including food delivery, e-commerce, auto parts, news, and government.
More recently, in February 2023, the spikes in mitigations were somewhat similar to what we saw one year ago, including electronics, e-commerce, IT, and education websites.
12.6% of network-layer traffic was DDoS activity in Q1 2022
Network-layer (layer 3 and 4) traffic is harder to attribute to a specific domain or target because IP addresses are shared across different customers. Looking at network-level DDoS traffic hitting our Kyiv data center, we saw peaks of DDoS traffic higher than before the war in early March, but they were much higher in June and August.
Several of our quarterly DDoS reports from 2022 include attack trends related to the war in Ukraine, with quarter over quarter interactive comparisons.
Network re-routing in Kherson
On February 24, 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast region. The city of Kherson was captured on March 2, as the first major city and only regional capital to be captured by Russian forces during the initial invasion. The Russian occupation of Kherson Oblast continued until Ukrainian forces resumed control on November 11, after launching a counteroffensive at the end of August.
On May 4, 2022, we published Tracking shifts in Internet connectivity in Kherson, Ukraine, a blog post that explored a re-routing event that impacted AS47598 (Khersontelecom), a telecommunications provider in Kherson Oblast. Below, we summarize this event, and explore similar activity across other providers in Kherson that has taken place since then.
On May 1, 2022, we observed a shift in routing for the IPv4 prefix announced by Ukrainian network AS47598 (Khersontelecom). During April, it reached the Internet through several other Ukrainian network providers, including AS12883 (Vega Telecom) and AS3326 (Datagroup). However, after the shift, its routing path now showed a Russian network, AS201776 (Miranda-Media), as the sole upstream provider. With traffic from KhersonTelecom passing through a Russian network, it was subject to the restrictions and limitations imposed on any traffic transiting Russian networks, including content filtering.
The flow of traffic from Khersontelecom before and after May 1, with rerouting through Russian network provider Miranda-Media, is illustrated in the chart below. This particular re-routing event was short-lived, as a routing update for AS47598 on May 4 saw it return to reaching the Internet through other Ukrainian providers.
As a basis for our analysis, we started with a list of 15 Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) belonging to networks in Kherson Oblast. Using that list, we analyzed routing information collected by route-views2 over the past year, from February 1, 2022, to February 15, 2023. route-views2 is a BGP route collector run by the University of Oregon Route Views Project. Note that with respect to the discussions of ASNs in this and the following section, we are treating them equally, and have not specifically factored estimated user population into these analyses.
The figure below illustrates the result of this analysis, showing that re-routing of Kherson network providers (listed along the y-axis) through Russian upstream networks was fairly widespread, and for some networks, has continued into 2023. During the analysis time frame, there were three primary Russian networks that appeared as upstream providers: AS201776 (Miranda-Media), AS52091 (Level-MSK Ltd.), and AS8492 (OBIT Ltd.).
Within the graph, black bars indicate periods when the ASN effectively disappeared from the Internet; white segments indicate the ASN was dependent on other Ukraine networks as immediate upstreams; and red indicates the presence of Russian networks in the set of upstream providers. The intensity of the red shading corresponds to the percentage of announced prefixes for which a Russian network provider is present in the routing path as observed from networks outside Ukraine. Bright red shading, equivalent to “1” in the legend, indicates the presence of a Russian provider in all routing paths for announced prefixes.
In the blog post linked above, we referenced an outage that began on April 30. This is clearly visible in the figure as a black bar that runs for several days across all the listed ASNs. In this instance, AS47598 (KhersonTelecom) recovered a day later, but was sending traffic through AS201776 (Miranda-Media), a Russian provider, as discussed above.
Another Ukrainian network, AS49168 (Brok-X), recovered from the outage on May 2, and was also sending traffic through Miranda-Media. By May 4, most of the other Kherson networks recovered from the outage, and both AS47598 and AS49168 returned to using Ukrainian networks as immediate upstream providers. Routing remained “normal” until May 30. Then, a more widespread shift to routing traffic through Russian providers began, although it appears that this shift was preceded by a brief outage for a few networks. For the most part, this re-routing lasted through the summer and into October. Some networks saw a brief outage on October 17, but most stopped routing directly through Russia by October 22.
However, this shift away from Russia was followed by periods of extended outages. KhersonTelecom suffered such an outage, and has remained offline since October, except for the first week of November when all of its traffic routed through Russia. Many other networks rejoined the Internet in early December, relying mostly on other Ukrainian providers for Internet connectivity. However, since early December, AS204485 (PE Berislav Cable Television), AS56359 (CHP Melnikov Roman Sergeevich), and AS49465 (Teleradiocompany RubinTelecom Ltd.) have continued to use Miranda-Media as an upstream provider, in addition to experiencing several brief outages. In addition, over the last several months, AS25082 (Viner Telecom) has used both a Ukrainian network and Miranda-Media as upstream providers.
Internet resilience in Ukraine
In the context of the Internet, “resilience” refers to the ability of a network to operate continuously in a manner that is highly resistant to disruption. This includes the ability of a network to: (1) operate in a degraded mode if damaged, (2) rapidly recover if failure does occur, and (3) scale to meet rapid or unpredictable demands. Throughout the Russia-Ukraine conflict, media coverage (VICE, Bloomberg, Washington Post) has highlighted the work done in Ukraine to repair damaged fiber-optic cables and mobile network infrastructure to keep the country online. This work has been critically important to maintaining the resilience of Ukrainian Internet infrastructure.
According to PeeringDB, as of February 2023, there are 25 Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in Ukraine and 50 interconnection facilities. (An IXP may span multiple physical facilities.) Within this set of IXPs, Autonomous Systems (ASes) belonging to international providers are currently present in over half of them. The number of facilities, IXPs, and international ASes present in Ukraine points to a resilient interconnection fabric, with multiple locations for both domestic and international providers to exchange traffic.
To better understand these international interconnections, we first analyze the connectivity of ASes in Ukraine, and we classify the links to domestic networks (links where both ASes are registered in Ukraine) and international networks (links between ASes in Ukraine and ASes outside Ukraine). To determine which ASes are domestic in Ukraine, we can use information from the extended delegation reports from the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), the Regional Internet Registry that covers Ukraine. We also parsed collected BGP data to extract the AS-level links between Ukrainian ASes and ASes registered in a different country, and we consider these the international connectivity of the domestic ASes.
A March 2022 article in The Economist noted that “For one thing, Ukraine boasts an unusually large number of internet-service providers—by one reckoning the country has the world’s fourth-least-concentrated Internet market. This means the network has few choke points, so is hard to disable.” As of the writing of this blog post, there are 2,190 ASes registered in Ukraine (UA ASes), and 1,574 of those ASes appear in the BGP routing table as active. These counts support the article’s characterization, and below we discuss several additional observations that reinforce Ukraine’s Internet resilience.
The figure above is a cumulative distribution function showing the fraction of domestic Ukrainian ASes that have direct connections to international networks. In February 2023, approximately 50% had more than one (100) international link, while approximately 10% had more than 10, and approximately 2% had 100 or more. Although these numbers have dropped slightly over the last year, they underscore the lack of centralized choke points in the Ukrainian Internet.
For the networks with international connectivity, we can also look at the distribution of “next-hop” countries – countries with which those international networks are associated. (Note that some networks may have a global footprint, and for these, the associated country is the one recorded in their autonomous system registration.) Comparing the choropleth maps below illustrates how this set of countries, and their fraction of international paths, have changed between February 2022 and February 2023. The data underlying these maps shows that international connectivity from Ukraine is distributed across 18 countries — unsurprisingly, mostly in Europe.
In February 2022, these countries/locations accounted for 77% of Ukraine’s next-hop international paths. The top four all had 7.8% each. However, in February 2023, the top 10 next-hop countries/locations dropped slightly to 76% of international paths. While just a slight change from the previous year, the set of countries/locations and many of their respective fractions saw considerable change.
February 2022
February 2023
1
Germany
7.85%
Russia
11.62%
2
Netherlands
7.85%
Germany
11.43%
3
United Kingdom
7.83%
Hong Kong
8.38%
4
Hong Kong
7.81%
Poland
7.93%
5
Sweden
7.77%
Italy
7.75%
6
Romania
7.72%
Turkey
6.86%
7
Russia
7.67%
Bulgaria
6.20%
8
Italy
7.64%
Netherlands
5.31%
9
Poland
7.60%
United Kingdom
5.30%
10
Hungary
7.54%
Sweden
5.26%
Russia’s share grew by 50% year to 11.6%, giving it the biggest share of next-hop ASes. Germany also grew to account for more than 11% of paths.
Satellite Internet connectivity
Cloudflare observed a rapid growth in Starlink’s ASN (AS14593) traffic to Ukraine during 2022 and into 2023. Between mid-March and mid-May, Starlink’s traffic in the country grew over 530%, and continued to grow from mid-May up until mid-November, increasing nearly 300% over that six-month period — from mid-March to mid-December the growth percentage was over 1600%. After that, traffic stabilized and even dropped a bit during January 2023.
Our data shows that between November and December 2022, Starlink represented between 0.22% and 0.3% of traffic from Ukraine, but that number is now lower than 0.2%.
Conclusion
One year in, the war in Ukraine has taken an unimaginable humanitarian toll. The Internet in Ukraine has also become a battleground, suffering attacks, re-routing, and disruptions. But it has proven to be exceptionally resilient, recovering time and time again from each setback.
We know that the need for a secure and reliable Internet there is more critical than ever. At Cloudflare, we’re committed to continue providing tools that protect Internet services from cyber attack, improve security for those operating in the region, and share information about Internet connectivity and routing inside Ukraine.
The Super Bowl has been happening since the end of the 1966 season, the same year that the ARPANET project, which gave birth to the Internet, was initiated. Around 20 years ago, 50% of the US population were Internet users, and that number is now around 92%. So, it’s no surprise that interest in an event like Super Bowl LVII resulted in a noticeable dip in Internet traffic in the United States at the time of the game’s kickoff, dropping to around 5% lower than the previous Sunday. During the game, Rihanna’s halftime show also caused a significant drop in Internet traffic across most states, with Pennsylvania and New York feeling the biggest impact, but messaging and video platforms saw a surge of traffic right after her show ended.
In this blog post, we will dive into who the biggest winners were among Super Bowl advertisers, as well as examine how traffic to food delivery services, social media and sports and betting websites changed during the game. In addition, we look at traffic trends seen at city and state levels during the game, as well as email threat volume across related categories in the weeks ahead of the game.
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 and the year before, we use DNS name resolution data from our 1.1.1.1 resolver 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.
Ads: are URLs no longer cool?
In contrast to Super Bowl commercials of the past 25 years, many of this year’s advertisements didn’t include a URL, possibly suggesting strong confidence by brands in their search engine results placement, or an assumption that the viewer would engage with the brand through an app on their phone, rather than a website. To that end, several ads did include an app store-related call to action, encouraging the viewer to download the associated mobile app. And possibly in an effort to capitalize on the success of Coinbase’s QR code commercial during Super Bowl LVI, a number of brands, including Toyota, Michelob Ultra, and Mr. Peanut included QR codes as a way for viewers to get additional information or see more.
As we did last year, we again tracked DNS request traffic to our 1.1.1.1 resolver in United States data centers for domains associated with the advertised products or brands. Traffic growth is plotted against a baseline calculated as the mean request volume for the associated domains between 1200-1500 EST on Sunday, February 12 (Super Bowl Sunday.) Although over 50 brands advertised during the game, the brands highlighted below were chosen because their advertisements drove some of the largest percentage traffic spikes, as well as one interesting tale.
BlueMoon
Although the commercial initially seemed to be for sibling beer brands Coors Light and Miller Lite, there was a twist at the end, This twist was only fitting, as the ad was actually for Blue Moon, which is often served with a twist of orange on the rim of the glass. Although beer ads don’t usually drive significant traffic spikes, this one did, reaching 76,400% above baseline for Blue Moon’s site. Coors Light saw a 275% bump in DNS traffic coincident with the ad, while Miller Lite grew 120%. However, traffic for Coors and Miller was fairly volatile at other times during the game.
LimitBreak
Although last year’s advertisements included a number of cryptocurrency-related brands, they were all but absent from this year’s slate of ads. The closest we got during this year’s game was a commercial from LimitBreak, which describes itself as “bringing the free-to-play gaming experience to Web3 and beyond”, in which it promoted a giveaway of thousands of its Dragon series NFTs. This ad featured a QR code and a URL, and given the nearly 54,000% increase in DNS traffic observed, both were effective means of driving traffic to the LimitBreak website.
Temu
Upstart mobile shopping app Temu purchased multiple Super Bowl ad slots to promote its “shop like a billionaire” campaign, urging viewers to download its mobile app. As seen in the graph below, these advertisements drove spikes in traffic, and continued engagement, each time they ran. The first airing at 19:16 EST drove a 222% spike over baseline in DNS traffic. However, the second airing at 21:12 EST apparently resulted in significantly more interest, driving a 475% traffic increase. A third airing at 22:20 EST reached 169% over baseline, with another one just after that reaching over 200%.
Dunkin’
In early January, Boston-area media blew up with the news that local celebrity Ben Affleck was spotted working the drive-through window at one of the coffee chain’s Medford locations, raising some speculation that he was filming a Super Bowl commercial. That speculation turned out to be true, as the commercial aired at 18:53 EST. But the commercial had a side effect: DNS traffic for dunkin.com, associated with DunkinWorks (a small personal coaching and training business), spiked 8,000% when the commercial aired, as shown in the graph below. (It isn’t clear what drove the later three spikes for dunkin.com, as the advertisement didn’t air again nationally during the remainder of the game.) We can only hope that the dunkin.com system administrators were fueled with plenty of coffee and donuts as they dealt with the rapid growth in traffic.
Site categories: touchdowns bring attention
As we saw last year, there are two factors that bring a surge of traffic to the websites of Super Bowl participants: touchdowns and winning. However, nothing is more impactful than the sweet taste of victory. Both the Kansas City Chiefs’ and Philadelphia Eagles’ websites experienced a surge in DNS traffic just before the game started, as compared to a baseline calculated as the mean request volume for the associated domains between 12:00-15:00 EST on Sunday, February 12 (Super Bowl Sunday.). The Eagles website had its peak just around the time of the kickoff, with 828% growth over baseline, and continued to grow more rapidly than traffic to the Chiefs’ website until 20:55 EST, when traffic to chiefs.com began to pull ahead.
What happened at that time? That was the moment of the Chiefs’ third touchdown of the game, when DNS traffic to the team’s website had its first peak of the evening, at 514% above baseline. There was a clear spike during another Chiefs touchdown at 21:42 EST, at 454% above baseline, but that was nothing compared to the end of the game, when the Kansas City Chiefs were once again, after their 2019 victory, the winners. At 22:15 EST, when the game ended, DNS traffic to the Chiefs’ website was 871% higher, and peaked 10 minutes later at 890%, as compared to the baseline. At this same time, DNS traffic for the Eagles’ website dropped significantly. As we saw last year as well, winning the Super Bowl clearly drives increased traffic to the victor’s website.
Sports websites trends also followed the in-game events. There was a clear spike to approximately 90% above baseline when the game started at 18:30 EST, with further growth to 120% over baseline at 19:00 EST during the Kansas City Chiefs’ first touchdown. There were also clear spikes at 21:30 and 21:40 EST coinciding with the two more Chiefs touchdowns. The Super Bowl peak for these websites was reached during the final break at 22:00 EST, reaching 145% above baseline, just before the Chiefs’ game-winning field goal. After a brief drop as the game ended, there was an additional spike to 134%.
Rihanna’s impact on messaging and social media sites
What happened following Rihanna’s performance during the Super Bowl halftime show? As the game resumed, we saw a clear increase in traffic for messaging websites, with a first peak right after the end of the show at around 20:45 EST, 22% over baseline. The biggest peak, however, was when the game ended. At 22:15 EST, DNS traffic for messaging sites was 30% higher than the earlier baseline.
Rihanna’s announcement of her second pregnancy, which made news after her performance, also impacted traffic to social media platforms. After a small increase when halftime started, there was a clear drop during Rihanna’s show, followed by a jump from 6% below baseline back to 0% right after the show. An additional 3% of traffic growth was reached during the final break at 22:00 EST, just before the Kansas City Chiefs’ winning field goal. After a brief drop, traffic reached 2% above baseline as the game ended.
Is halftime also a time for rewatching ads?
The arrival of halftime at 20:21 EST also brought a surge in DNS traffic for video platforms. The first peak was reached at 18:00 EST, before the game started, at 12% above baseline. The peak during halftime was reached at 20:25 EST with 13% growth above baseline, suggesting that viewers may have been looking at that time to Super Bowl related videos or just using the time to browse those platforms.
Food delivery websites saw flat to lower DNS traffic just before the game as compared to the earlier baseline, suggesting that food orders were placed/scheduled earlier in the afternoon, hours before the game. At kickoff, traffic was 19% below baseline, but there was a clear spike at the time of the first break and right after the first Kansas City touchdown at 18:55 EST. After falling again during the game, there was a small increase in traffic observed just after the game ended.
What about betting sites? They expected a big day during the Super Bowl, given that more states have recently legalized gambling on sports. The peak was reached at 19:00 EST, as DNS traffic reached 295% over baseline, when the Chiefs had their first touchdown, The first Eagles touchdown, minutes before, resulted in a 233% spike. The lowest traffic for betting sites during the Super Bowl was during the halftime show. In the second half of the game, two other clear spikes in traffic are visible. The first was at 20:55 EST at 167% above baseline when the Chiefs pulled ahead with a touchdown, and then a jump to 278% over baseline when the game ended.
Rihanna runs this town city
While the so-called NFL cities across the country are loyal to their local teams, looking at traffic trends across cities from both conferences makes it clear that fans everywhere find joy, not division, in the unknown pleasures of a good halftime show. The drop visible in both graphs below between 20:30-20:50 EST coincides with Rihanna’s return to live performance, as she last performed live in January 2018. Based on the observed drop in traffic, viewers apparently turned away from their computers and devices, giving their attention to Rihanna, or at least stopped their general Internet surfing during the halftime show. As the graphs show, traffic recovered as soon as halftime was over.
Zooming in to individual cities, we examined the traffic patterns observed in both Philadelphia and Kansas City. While both teams have fans across the country, we can use their home cities as a proxy. In this case, we compared normalized Internet traffic levels between 17:00-22:30 EST on Super Bowl Sunday (February 12) with the same time frame on the prior Sunday (February 5).
In Kansas City last Sunday, traffic volumes remained fairly consistent across the surveyed time period. However, on Super Bowl Sunday, traffic levels were initially similar, but by the start of the game were 84% lower than the same time the previous week. Slight drops in traffic are visible coincident with Chiefs touchdowns, but don’t stand out from the overall noisiness of the graph. The graph reached its nadir at 22:13 EST when the Chiefs broke the tie and kicked the game-winning field goal, with the significant drop in traffic likely due to an increased shift in focus towards the outcome of the game, even by those that hadn’t previously been paying close attention.
As the graph below shows, last Sunday saw Internet traffic in Philadelphia gradually decline as the evening wore on. On Super Bowl Sunday, traffic started out slightly lower than the week prior, and also diverged as game time approached, reaching nearly 50% lower at kickoff. As the Eagles took an early lead, their first touchdown resulted in a noticeable drop in traffic from Philadelphia, seen at 18:52 EST, less than 10 minutes after the start of the game. Visible drops in traffic are also coincident with the Eagles’ other three touchdowns, although they don’t stand out against the volatility of the graph. Traffic began to drop towards the end of the game, as the tie score added tension, and reached its lowest point when it became clear that the Eagles were not going to emerge victorious in Super Bowl LVII.
State-level traffic trends: the winning impact
In addition to looking at traffic impacts at a city level, we can also zoom out to examine Internet traffic trends in the Super Bowl states. Arizona, which hosted the big game at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, saw a drop in state-level traffic starting around 13:00 EST. At the time of the kickoff, traffic was 25% lower than the previous Sunday, but the biggest impact was during the wildly popular halftime show by Rihanna. At 20:30 EST, traffic was 29% lower than the same time on the previous Sunday. After the game ended, traffic levels returned to normal around 23:30 EST.
In Pennsylvania, home of the Philadelphia Eagles, traffic began to dip after 15:00 EST and reached its first low point around kickoff, when it was 28% lower than the previous Sunday. Just like in Arizona, the biggest difference was during Rihanna’s halftime show, when it was a whopping 33% lower than usual. However, just a few minutes after the game ended at 22:30 EST, traffic returned to normal.
What about the winning team’s state of Missouri? There, traffic started to decrease only after 17:00 EST and was actually higher than the previous Sunday before that point. With the kickoff came a clear drop, resulting in 28% less traffic than the previous Sunday at the same time. Traffic increased a bit heading towards halftime, but dropped again during Rihanna’s show, when it was 30% lower than usual. The biggest drop in traffic, not surprisingly, was during the exciting moment of the Kansas City Chiefs’ winning field goal. At 22:15 EST, traffic was 33% lower than the previous Sunday. However, after 22:50 EST, Internet traffic in Missouri was back on the fast track, with traffic increasing to levels higher than the previous Sunday.
Rihanna’s halftime performance had a clear impact on Internet traffic at a state level, which dropped across all states with NFL teams at the time of her show. Below we take a closer look at the most populous states, among which Pennsylvania, New York and Arizona were winners, with the largest traffic declines. The impacts in Pennsylvania and Arizona are shown above, and the graph below shows the traffic trends seen in New York.
California, Texas, Florida, and New York all had their fair share of Internet traffic dropping before and throughout the game, but it was during the halftime show when things really got interesting. At the time of Rihanna’s performance, Internet traffic in California was 24% lower than the previous Sunday, while in Texas it was 21% below a week earlier, and Florida also saw a 21% drop. Meanwhile, New York had a clear 30% decrease in traffic during the show and, as shown above, Pennsylvania took the cake with a 33% drop. Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan were close behind with 23%, 27%, 22%, 25%, and 22% drops respectively.
This seems to be a clear indication that the Super Bowl in general, but also the much-anticipated halftime shows, and the winning celebrations, all have a massive impact on the Internet, causing a noticeable dip in Internet traffic, especially in the state of the winning team.
Do email spammers and scammers take advantage of “The Big Game”?
Spammers and scammers will frequently try to take advantage of the popularity of major events when running their campaigns, hoping the tie-in will entice the user to open the message and click on a malicious link, or visit a malicious website where they give up a password or credit card number. Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security analyzed the subject lines of email messages processed by the service in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl to identify malicious, suspicious, and spam messages across four topic areas: Super Bowl/football, sports gambling, sports media/websites, and food delivery.
As the “regular” season NFL games wrapped up, Super Bowl and football themed email threat volume remained relatively low. However, campaigns clearly picked up between January 23-29 as the message count grew sevenfold. However, campaigns kicked into high gear once the Chiefs and Eagles were headed to the Super Bowl, as the number of identified messages between January 30 and February 5 was nearly six times higher than the previous week. These campaigns quickly ended in the week before the big game, though, as Super Bowl and football themed suspicious, malicious, and spam email volume dropped by nearly 90%.
Overall, the number of sports gambling themed subject lines remained fairly low over the survey period. This is somewhat surprising, given that an increasing number of US states have recently legalized betting on sporting events. Interestingly, the trend was highest at the beginning of the year, although that first week was too late to capture potential interest in college football “bowl” games. However, the weeks ahead of the NFL conference championship games (January 23-29) and the Super Bowl (February 6-12) saw message volume increase to levels nearly 2.5x higher than previous weeks.
Sports media and website themed suspicious, malicious, and spam email messages apparently don’t draw the clicks, because the volume of such messages seen by Cloudflare Area 1 has remained extremely low since the start of the year, but peaked during the week of January 23-29. And although lower in volume, the observed trends were similar to those seen for sports gambling, with peaks during the same weeks.
For many people, the Super Bowl is less about the football game than it is about the commercials and the food, and the growth of food delivery services over the last few years have made it easier to ensure that the snacks and libations never run out during the game. Scammers and spammers have apparently learned to take advantage of this hunger, as food delivery themed email messages saw the highest counts across the four categories reviewed here. Peak message counts were seen the weeks of January 2-8 and January 30-February 5. Message volume the weeks following these peaks fell by over 50% in both cases.
Conclusion
As we have seen time and again, advertising during the Super Bowl can drive significant traffic spikes, and apparently this holds true even if a URL isn’t included as a call to action within the commercial. In addition, the trends observed during the game remain a clear reminder that human behavior drives Internet traffic, especially when the halftime show features a popular singer that last performed live five years ago.
Visit Cloudflare Radar for up to date Internet traffic and attack trends, and follow the Cloudflare Radar Twitter and Mastodon accounts for regular insights on Internet events.
This was a weekend of record-breaking DDoS attacks. Over the weekend, Cloudflare detected and mitigated dozens of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks. The majority of attacks peaked in the ballpark of 50-70 million requests per second (rps) with the largest exceeding 71 million rps. This is the largest reported HTTP DDoS attack on record, more than 35% higher than the previous reported record of 46M rps in June 2022.
The attacks were HTTP/2-based and targeted websites protected by Cloudflare. They originated from over 30,000 IP addresses. Some of the attacked websites included a popular gaming provider, cryptocurrency companies, hosting providers, and cloud computing platforms. The attacks originated from numerous cloud providers, and we have been working with them to crack down on the botnet.
Record breaking attack: DDoS attack exceeding 71 million requests per second
Over the past year, we’ve seen more attacks originate from cloud computing providers. For this reason, we will be providing service providers that own their own autonomous system a free Botnet threat feed. The feed will provide service providers threat intelligence about their own IP space; attacks originating from within their autonomous system. Service providers that operate their own IP space can now sign up to the early access waiting list.
Is this related to the Super Bowl or Killnet?
No. This campaign of attacks arrives less than two weeks after the Killnet DDoS campaign that targeted healthcare websites. Based on the methods and targets, we do not believe that these recent attacks are related to the healthcare campaign. Furthermore, yesterday was the US Super Bowl, and we also do not believe that this attack campaign is related to the game event.
What are DDoS attacks?
Distributed Denial of Service attacks are cyber attacks that aim to take down Internet properties and make them unavailable for users. These types of cyberattacks can be very efficient against unprotected websites and they can be very inexpensive for the attackers to execute.
An HTTP DDoS attack usually involves a flood of HTTP requests towards the target website. The attacker’s objective is to bombard the website with more requests than it can handle. Given a sufficiently high amount of requests, the website’s server will not be able to process all of the attack requests along with the legitimate user requests. Users will experience this as website-load delays, timeouts, and eventually not being able to connect to their desired websites at all.
Illustration of a DDoS attack
To make attacks larger and more complicated, attackers usually leverage a network of bots — a botnet. The attacker will orchestrate the botnet to bombard the victim’s websites with HTTP requests. A sufficiently large and powerful botnet can generate very large attacks as we’ve seen in this case.
However, building and operating botnets requires a lot of investment and expertise. What is the average Joe to do? Well, an average Joe that wants to launch a DDoS attack against a website doesn’t need to start from scratch. They can hire one of numerous DDoS-as-a-Service platforms for as little as $30 per month. The more you pay, the larger and longer of an attack you’re going to get.
Why DDoS attacks?
Over the years, it has become easier, cheaper, and more accessible for attackers and attackers-for-hire to launch DDoS attacks. But as easy as it has become for the attackers, we want to make sure that it is even easier – and free – for defenders of organizations of all sizes to protect themselves against DDoS attacks of all types.
Unlike Ransomware attacks, Ransom DDoS attacks don’t require an actual system intrusion or a foothold within the targeted network. Usually Ransomware attacks start once an employee naively clicks an email link that installs and propagates the malware. There’s no need for that with DDoS attacks. They are more like a hit-and-run attack. All a DDoS attacker needs to know is the website’s address and/or IP address.
Is there an increase in DDoS attacks?
Yes. The size, sophistication, and frequency of attacks has been increasing over the past months. In our latest DDoS threat report, we saw that the amount of HTTP DDoS attacks increased by 79% year-over-year. Furthermore, the amount of volumetric attacks exceeding 100 Gbps grew by 67% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ), and the number of attacks lasting more than three hours increased by 87% QoQ.
But it doesn’t end there. The audacity of attackers has been increasing as well. In our latest DDoS threat report, we saw that Ransom DDoS attacks steadily increased throughout the year. They peaked in November 2022 where one out of every four surveyed customers reported being subject to Ransom DDoS attacks or threats.
Distribution of Ransom DDoS attacks by month
Should I be worried about DDoS attacks?
Yes. If your website, server, or networks are not protected against volumetric DDoS attacks using a cloud service that provides automatic detection and mitigation, we really recommend that you consider it.
Cloudflare customers shouldn’t be worried, but should be aware and prepared. Below is a list of recommended steps to ensure your security posture is optimized.
What steps should I take to defend against DDoS attacks?
Cloudflare’s systems have been automatically detecting and mitigating these DDoS attacks.
Cloudflare offers many features and capabilities that you may already have access to but may not be using. So as extra precaution, we recommend taking advantage of these capabilities to improve and optimize your security posture:
Ensure all DDoS Managed Rules are set to default settings (High sensitivity level and mitigation actions) for optimal DDoS activation.
Cloudflare Enterprise customers that are subscribed to the Advanced DDoS Protection service should consider enabling Adaptive DDoS Protection, which mitigates attacks more intelligently based on your unique traffic patterns.
Deploy firewall rules and rate limiting rules to enforce a combined positive and negative security model. Reduce the traffic allowed to your website based on your known usage.
Ensure your origin is not exposed to the public Internet (i.e., only enable access to Cloudflare IP addresses). As an extra security precaution, we recommend contacting your hosting provider and requesting new origin server IPs if they have been targeted directly in the past.
Customers with access to Managed IP Lists should consider leveraging those lists in firewall rules. Customers with Bot Management should consider leveraging the threat scores within the firewall rules.
Enable caching as much as possible to reduce the strain on your origin servers, and when using Workers, avoid overwhelming your origin server with more subrequests than necessary.
Defending against DDoS attacks is critical for organizations of all sizes. While attacks may be initiated by humans, they are executed by bots — and to play to win, you must fight bots with bots. Detection and mitigation must be automated as much as possible, because relying solely on humans to mitigate in real time puts defenders at a disadvantage. Cloudflare’s automated systems constantly detect and mitigate DDoS attacks for our customers, so they don’t have to. This automated approach, combined with our wide breadth of security capabilities, lets customers tailor the protection to their needs.
We’ve been providing unmetered and unlimited DDoS protection for free to all of our customers since 2017, when we pioneered the concept. 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.
Today we mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. We commemorate the victims that were robbed of their possessions, stripped of their rights, deported, starved, dehumanized and murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices. During the Holocaust and in the events that led to it, the Nazis exterminated one third of the European Jewish population. Six million Jews, along with countless other members of minority and disability groups, were murdered because the Nazis believed they were inferior.
Seventy eight years later, after the liberation of the infamous Auschwitz death camp, antisemitism still burns with hatred. According to a study performed by the Campaign Against Antisemitism organization on data provided by the UK Home Office, Jews are 500% more likely to be targeted by hate crime than any other faith group per capita.
From Cloudflare’s vantage point we can point to distressing findings as well. In 2021, cyberattacks on Holocaust educational websites doubled year over year. In 2021, one out of every 100 HTTP requests sent to Holocaust educational websites behind Cloudflare was part of an attack. In 2022, the share of those cyber attacks grew again by 49% YoY. Cyberattacks represented 1.6% of all traffic to Holocaust educational websites (almost 1 out of every 50 HTTP requests), as can be seen in the chart below in 2022.
We’re representing cyberattacks as a percentage to normalize natural growth of traffic to websites, mitigation methods and other potential data biases. But even if we look at the raw numbers, between 2021 and 2022, the absolute cyberattack traffic (in HTTP requests) that targeted Holocaust education websites behind Cloudflare grew by 640% in contrast to the total growth of 397% in the number of all requests (attack and non-attack HTTP requests).
Share of cyberattack targeting Holocaust education websites
(Please note that the graph starts in 95% in order to provide better visibility into the share of attacks)
The threat that Holocaust educational websites face is one that many other non-profit organizations face. In fact, in our most recent DDoS Trends report, non-profit organizations were the sixth most targeted industry. Ten percent of all traffic to non-profit websites behind Cloudflare was DDoS attack traffic.
Top industries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks in 2022 Q4
However, nonprofits such as Holocaust educational organizations might not always have the resources to fend off attacks. For this reason, we provide free protection to at-risk groups across the world. We do this through Project Galileo. It helps keep vulnerable websites online. It provides free cyber security services for groups working in the arts, human rights, civil society, journalism, or democracy. As detailed in our recent Impact Report, in 2022, through Project Galileo, we protected vulnerable websites from an average of 59M cyber threats every day.
If you’re representing a vulnerable public interest group and want to protect your website with Project Galileo, please follow the steps and apply here. While you wait to hear back, you can also get started with our Free plan.
At Cloudflare, we remember and never forget.
Here at Cloudflare, some of us are descendants of Holocaust survivors. My grandparents escaped Nazi-occupied Poland after the German invasion. Sadly, my grandparents — as other elderly survivors, have already passed. I grew up hearing about their stories of bravery — and of deep torment. It’s not always easy to hear these stories, but we must — especially in times like these when war in Europe has been ongoing for almost a year now. We have the responsibility to ensure the world remembers and never forgets the atrocities of the Holocaust and what antisemitism, racism and hatred in general can lead to.
To this extent, a few months ago, here at the Cloudflare London office, we had the honor of hosting Janine Webber, recipient of the British Empire Medal (BEM) in an event hosted by Judeoflare, Cloudflare’s Jewish employee resource group. The event was made possible due to our partnership with the Holocaust Education Trust. And so in a fully packed auditorium and an oversubscribed Zoom call, we listen to Janine’s story of survival and bravery first hand. We asked questions and we learned.
We’re privileged to be able to share her story here with all of you via Cloudflare TV.
Welcome to our DDoS Threat Report for the fourth and final quarter of 2022. This report includes insights and trends about the DDoS threat landscape – as observed across Cloudflare’s global network.
In the last quarter of the year, as billions around the world celebrated holidays and events such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Black Friday, Singles’ Day, and New Year, DDoS attacks persisted and even increased in size, frequency, and sophistication whilst attempting to disrupt our way of life.
Cloudflare’s automated DDoS defenses stood firm and mitigated millions of attacks in the last quarter alone. We’ve taken all of those attacks, aggregated, analyzed, and prepared the bottom lines to help you better understand the threat landscape.
Global DDoS insights
In the last quarter of the year, despite a year-long decline, the amount of HTTP DDoS attack traffic still increased by 79% YoY. While most of these attacks were small, Cloudflare constantly saw terabit-strong attacks, DDoS attacks in the hundreds of millions of packets per second, and HTTP DDoS attacks peaking in the tens of millions of requests per second launched by sophisticated botnets.
Volumetric attacks surged; the number of attacks exceeding rates of 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) grew by 67% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ), and the number of attacks lasting more than three hours increased by 87% QoQ.
Ransom DDoS attacks steadily increased this year. In Q4, over 16% of respondents reported receiving a threat or ransom demand as part of the DDoS attack that targeted their Internet properties.
Industries most targeted by DDoS attacks
HTTP DDoS attacks constituted 35% of all traffic to Aviation and Aerospace Internet properties.
Similarly, over a third of all traffic to the Gaming/Gambling and Finance industries was network-layer DDoS attack traffic.
A whopping 92% of traffic to Education Management companies was part of network-layer DDoS attacks. Likewise, 73% of traffic to the Information Technology and Services and the Public Relations & Communications industries were also network-layer DDoS attacks.
Source and targets of DDoS attacks
In Q4, 93% of network-layer traffic to Chinese Internet properties behind Cloudflare were part of network-layer DDoS attacks. Similarly, over 86% of traffic to Cloudflare customers in Lithuania and 80% of traffic to Cloudflare customers in Finland was attack traffic.
On the application-layer, over 42% of all traffic to Georgian Internet properties behind Cloudflare was part of HTTP DDoS attacks, followed by Belize with 28%, and San Marino in third place with just below 20%. Almost 20% of all traffic from Libya that Cloudflare saw was application-layer DDoS attack traffic.
Over 52% of all traffic recorded in Cloudflare’s data centers in Botswana was network-layer DDoS attack traffic. Similarly, in Cloudflare’s data centers in Azerbaijan, Paraguay, and Palestine, network-layer DDoS attack traffic constituted approximately 40% of all traffic.
Quick note: this quarter, we’ve made a change to our algorithms to improve the accuracy of our data which means that some of these data points are incomparable to previous quarters. Read more about these changes in the next section Changes to the report methodologies.
Sign up to the DDoS Trends Webinar to learn more about the emerging threats and how to defend against them.
Changes to the report methodologies
Since our first report in 2020, we’ve always used percentages to represent attack traffic, i.e., the percentage of attack traffic out of all traffic including legitimate/user traffic. We did this to normalize the data, avoid data biases, and be more flexible when it comes to incorporating new mitigation system data into the report.
In this report, we’ve introduced changes to the methods used to calculate some of those percentages when we bucket attacks by certain dimensions such as target country, source country, or target industry. In the application-layer sections, we previously divided the amount of attack HTTP/S requests to a given dimension by all the HTTP/S requests to all dimensions. In the network-layer section, specifically in Target industries and Target countries, we used to divide the amount of attack IP packets to a given dimension by the total attack packets to all dimensions.
From this report onwards, we now divide the attack requests (or packets) to a given dimension only by the total requests (or packets) to that given dimension. We made these changes in order to align our calculation methods throughout the report and improve the data accuracy so it better represents the attack landscape.
For example, the top industry attacked by application-layer DDoS attacks using the previous method was the Gaming and Gambling industry. The attack requests towards that industry accounted for 0.084% of all traffic (attack and non-attack) to all industries. Using that same old method, the Aviation and Aerospace industry came in 12th place. Attack traffic towards the Aviation and Aerospace industry accounted for 0.0065% of all traffic (attack and non-attack) to all industries. However, using the new method, the Aviation and Aerospace industry came in as the number one most attacked industry — attack traffic formed 35% of all traffic (attack and non-attack) towards that industry alone. Again using the new method, the Gaming and Gambling industry came in 14th place — 2.4% of its traffic was attack traffic.
The old calculation method used in previous reports to calculate the percentage of attack traffic for each dimension was the following:
The new calculation method used from this report onwards is the following:
The changes apply to the following metrics:
Target industries of application-layer DDoS attacks
Target countries of application-layer DDoS attacks
Source of application-layer DDoS attacks
Target industries of network-layer DDoS attacks
Target countries of network-layer DDoS attacks
No other changes were made in the report. The Source of network-layer DDoS attacks metrics already use this method since the first report. Also, no changes were made to the Ransom DDoS attacks, DDoS attack rate, DDoS attack duration, DDoS attack vectors, and Top emerging threats sections. These metrics do not take legitimate traffic into consideration and no methodology alignment was needed.
With that in mind, let’s dive in deeper and explore these insights and trends. You can also view an interactive version of this report on Cloudflare Radar.
Ransom DDoS attacks
As opposed to Ransomware attacks, where the victim is tricked into downloading a file or clicking on an email link that encrypts and locks their computer files until they pay a ransom fee, Ransom DDoS attacks can be much easier for attackers to launch. Ransom DDoS attacks don’t require tricking the victim into opening an email or clicking a link, nor do they require a network intrusion or a foothold to be carried out.
In a Ransom DDoS attack, the attacker doesn’t need access to the victim’s computer but rather just floods them with enough traffic to negatively impact their Internet services. The attacker will demand a ransom payment, usually in the form of Bitcoin, to stop and/or avoid further attacks.
In the last quarter of 2022, 16% of Cloudflare customers that responded to our survey reported being targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks accompanied by a threat or a ransom note. This represents a 14% increase QoQ but a 16% decrease YoY in reported Ransom DDoS attacks.
Distribution of Ransom DDoS attacks over 2021 and 2022 by quarter (each column represents the percentage of users reporting a ransom attack)
How we calculate Ransom DDoS attack trends Cloudflare’s 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, Cloudflare has been surveying attacked customers. One of the questions in the survey asks the respondents if they received a threat or a ransom note. Over the past two years, on average, we collected 187 responses per quarter. The responses of this survey are used to calculate the percentage of Ransom DDoS attacks.
Application-layer DDoS attack landscape
Application-layer DDoS attacks, specifically HTTP/S DDoS attacks, are cyber attacks that usually aim to disrupt web servers by making them 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.
Application-layer DDoS attack trends
When we look at the graph below, we can see a clear downward trend in attacks each quarter this year. However, despite the downward trend, HTTP DDoS attacks still increased by 79% when compared to the same quarter of previous year.
Distribution of HTTP DDoS attacks over the last year by quarter
Target industries of application-layer DDoS attacks
In the quarter where many people travel for the holidays, the Aviation and Aerospace was the most attacked industry. Approximately 35% of traffic to the industry was part of HTTP DDoS attacks. In second place, the Events Services industry saw over 16% of its traffic as HTTP DDoS attacks.
In the following places were the Media and Publishing, Wireless, Government Relations, and Non-profit industries. To learn more about how Cloudflare protects non-profit and human rights organizations, read our recent Impact Report.
Top industries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks in 2022 Q4
When we break it down regionally, and after excluding generic industry buckets like Internet and Software, we can see that in North America and Oceania the Telecommunications industry was the most targeted. In South America and Africa, the Hospitality industry was the most targeted. In Europe and Asia, Gaming & Gambling industries were the most targeted. And in the Middle East, the Education industry saw the most attacks.
Top industries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks in 2022 Q4, by region
Target countries of application-layer DDoS attacks
Bucketing attacks by our customers’ billing address helps us understand which countries are more frequently attacked. In Q4, over 42% of all traffic to Georgian HTTP applications behind Cloudflare was DDoS attack traffic.
In second place, Belize-based companies saw almost a third of their traffic as DDoS attacks, followed by San Marino in third with just below 20% of its traffic being DDoS attack traffic.
Top countries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks in 2022 Q4
Source of application-layer DDoS attacks
Quick note before we dive in. If a country is found to be a major source of DDoS attacks, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is that country that launches the attacks. Most often with DDoS attacks, attackers are launching attacks remotely in an attempt to hide their true location. Top source countries are more often indicators that there are botnet nodes operating from within that country, perhaps hijacked servers or IoT devices.
In Q4, almost 20% of all HTTP traffic originating from Libya was part of HTTP DDoS attacks. Similarly, 18% of traffic originating from Timor-Leste, an island country in Southeast Asia just north of Australia, was attack traffic. DDoS attack traffic also accounted for 17% of all traffic originating from the British Virgin Islands and 14% of all traffic originating from Afghanistan.
Top source countries of HTTP DDoS attacks in 2022 Q4
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 DDoS attacks aim to overwhelm network infrastructure, such as in-line routers and servers, and the Internet link itself.
Network-layer DDoS attack trends
After a year of steady increases in network-layer DDoS attacks, in the fourth and final quarter of the year, the amount of attacks actually decreased by 14% QoQ and 13% YoY.
Distribution of Network-layer DDoS attacks over the last year by quarter
Now let’s dive a little deeper to understand the various attack properties such as the attack volumetric rates, durations, attack vectors, and emerging threats.
DDoS attack rate While the vast majority of attacks are relatively short and small, we did see a spike in longer and larger attacks this quarter. The amount of volumetric network-layer DDoS attacks with a rate exceeding 100 Gbps increased by 67% QoQ. Similarly, attacks in the range of 1-100 Gbps increased by ~20% QoQ, and attacks in the range of 500 Mbps to 1 Gbps increased by 108% QoQ.
QoQ change in DDoS attack rates in 2022 Q4
Below is an example of one of those attacks exceeding 100 Gbps that took place the week after Thanksgiving. This was a 1 Tbps DDoS attack targeted at a Korean-based hosting provider. This particular attack was an ACK flood, and it lasted roughly one minute. Since the hosting provider was using Magic Transit, Cloudflare’s L3 DDoS protection service, the attack was automatically detected and mitigated.
Graph of a 1 Tbps DDoS attack
While bit-intensive attacks usually aim to clog up the Internet connection to cause a denial of service event, packet-intensive attacks attempt to crash in-line devices. If an attack sends more packets than you can handle, the servers and other in-line appliances might not be able to process legitimate user traffic, or even crash altogether.
DDoS attack duration In Q4, the amount of shorter attacks lasting less than 10 minutes decreased by 76% QoQ, and the amount of longer attacks increased. Most notably, attacks lasting 1-3 hours increased by 349% QoQ and the amount of attacks lasting more than three hours increased by 87% QoQ. Most of the attacks, over 67% of them, lasted 10-20 minutes.
QoQ change in the duration of DDoS attacks in 2022 Q4
DDoS attack vectors The attack vector is a term used to describe the attack method. In Q4, SYN floods remained the attacker’s method of choice — in fact, almost half of all network-layer DDoS attacks were SYN floods.
As a recap, SYN floods are a flood of SYN packets (TCP packets with the Synchronize flag turned on, i.e., the bit set to 1). SYN floods take advantage of the statefulness of the Three-way TCP handshake — which is the way to establish a connection between a server and a client.
The Three-way TCP Handshake
The client starts off by sending a SYN packet, the server responds with a Synchronize-acknowledgement (SYN/ACK) packet and waits for the client’s Acknowledgement (ACK) packet. For every connection, a certain amount of memory is allocated. In the SYN flood, the source IP addresses may be spoofed (altered) by the attacker, causing the server to respond with the SYN/ACK packets to the spoofed IP addresses — which most likely ignore the packet. The server then naively waits for the never arriving ACK packets to complete the handshake. After a while, the server times out and releases those resources. However, given a sufficient amount of SYN packets in a short amount of time, they may be enough to drain the server’s resources and render it unable to handle legitimate user connections or even crash altogether.
After SYN floods, with a massive drop in share, DNS floods and amplification attacks came in second place, accounting for ~15% of all network-layer DDoS attacks. And in third UDP-based DDoS attacks and floods with a 9% share.
Top attack vectors in 2022 Q4
Emerging DDoS threats In Q4, Memcached-based DDoS attacks saw the highest growth — a 1,338% increase QoQ. Memcached is a database caching system for speeding up websites and networks. Memcached servers that support UDP can be abused to launch amplification/reflection DDoS attacks. In this case, the attacker would request content from the caching system and spoof the victim’s IP address as the source IP in the UDP packets. The victim will be flooded with the Memcache responses which can be amplified by a factor of up to 51,200x.
In second place, SNMP-based DDoS attacks increased by 709% QoQ. 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 numerous 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.
In third place, VxWorks-based DDoS attacks increased by 566% QoQ. VxWorks is a real-time operating system (RTOS) often used in embedded systems such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It also is used in networking and security devices, such as switches, routers, and firewalls. By default, it has a debug service enabled which not only allows anyone to do pretty much anything to those systems, but it can also be used for DDoS amplification attacks. This exploit (CVE-2010-2965) was exposed as early as 2010 and as we can see it is still being used in the wild to generate DDoS attacks.
Top emerging threats in 2022 Q4
Target industries of network-layer DDoS attacks
In Q4, the Education Management industry saw the highest percentage of network-layer DDoS attack traffic — 92% of all traffic routed to the industry was network-layer DDoS attack traffic.
Not too far behind, in the second and third places, the Information Technology and Services alongside the Public Relations and Communications industries also saw a significant amount of network-layer DDoS attack traffic (~73%). With a high margin, the Finance, Gaming / Gambling, and Medical Practice industries came in next with approximately a third of their traffic flagged as attack traffic.
Top industries targeted by network-layer DDoS attacks in 2022 Q4
Target countries of network-layer DDoS attacks
Grouping attacks by our customers’ billing country lets us understand which countries are subject to more attacks. In Q4, a staggering 93% of traffic to Chinese Internet properties behind Cloudflare was network-layer DDoS attack traffic.
In second place, Lithuanian Internet properties behind Cloudflare saw 87% of their traffic belonging to network-layer DDoS attack traffic. Following were Finland, Singapore, and Taiwan with the highest percentage of attack traffic.
Top countries targeted by network-layer DDoS attacks in 2022 Q4
Source of network-layer DDoS attacks
In the application-layer, we used the attacking IP addresses to understand the origin country of the attacks. That is because at that layer, IP addresses cannot be spoofed (i.e., altered). However, in the network layer, source IP addresses can be spoofed. So, instead of relying on IP addresses to understand the source, we instead use the location of our data centers where the attack packets were ingested. We’re able to get geographical accuracy due to our large global coverage in over 275+ locations around the world.
In Q4, over 52% of the traffic we ingested in our Botswana-based data center was attack traffic. Not too far behind, over 43% of traffic in Azerbaijan was attack traffic, followed by Paraguay, Palestine, Laos, and Nepal.
Top Cloudflare data center locations with the highest percentage of DDoS attack traffic in 2022 Q4
Please note: Internet Service Providers may sometimes route traffic differently which may skew results. For example, traffic from China may be hauled through California due to various operational considerations.
Understanding the DDoS threat landscape
This quarter, longer and larger attacks became more frequent. Attack durations increased across the board, volumetric attacks surged, and Ransom DDoS attacks continued to rise. During the 2022 holiday season, the top targeted industries for DDoS attacks at the application-layer were Aviation/Aerospace and Events Services. Network-layer DDoS attacks targeted Gaming/Gambling, Finance, and Education Management companies. We also saw a shift in the top emerging threats, with Memcashed-based DDoS attacks continuing to increase in prevalence.
Defending against DDoS attacks is critical for organizations of all sizes. While attacks may be initiated by humans, they are executed by bots — and to play to win, you must fight bots with bots. Detection and mitigation must be automated as much as possible, because relying solely on humans puts defenders at a disadvantage. Cloudflare’s automated systems constantly detect and mitigate DDoS attacks for our customers, so they don’t have to.
Over the years, it has become easier, cheaper, and more accessible for attackers and attackers-for-hire to launch DDoS attacks. But as easy as it has become for the attackers, we want to make sure that it is even easier – and free – for defenders of organizations of all sizes to protect themselves against DDoS attacks of all types. We’ve been providing unmetered and unlimited DDoS protection for free to all of our customers since 2017 — when we pioneered the concept. 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.
Sign up to the DDoS Trends Webinar to learn more about the emerging threats and how to defend against them.
In 2022, with nearly five billion people around the world (as well as an untold number of “bots”) using the Internet, analyzing aggregate data about this usage can uncover some very interesting trends. To that end, we’re excited to present the Cloudflare Radar 2022 Year In Review, featuring interactive charts, graphs, and maps you can use to explore notable Internet trends observed throughout this past year. The Year In Review website is part of Cloudflare Radar, which celebrated its second birthday in September with the launch of Radar 2.0.
We have organized the trends we observed around three different topic areas: Traffic, Adoption, and Security. The content covered within each of these areas is described in more detail in their respective sections below. Building on the 2021 Year In Review, we have incorporated several additional metrics this year, and have also improved the underlying methodology. (As such, the charts are not directly comparable to develop insights into year-over-year changes.)
Website visualizations shown at a weekly granularity cover the period from January 2 through November 26, 2022 (the start of the first full week of the year through the end of the last full week of November). We plan to update the underlying data sets through the end of the year in early 2023. Trends for nearly 200 locations are available on the website, with some smaller or less populated locations excluded due to insufficient data.
Before we jump in, we urge anyone who prefers to see the headline stats up front and to explore the data themselves to go ahead and visit the website. Anyone who wants a more lengthy, but curated set of observations should continue reading below. Regardless, we encourage you to consider how the trends presented within this post and the website’s various sections impact your business or organization, and to think about how these insights can inform actions that you can take to improve user experience or enhance your security posture.
Traffic
Anyone following recent technology headlines might assume that the Internet’s decades-long trend of incredible growth would have finally begun to falter. In times like these, data is key. Our data indicates that global Internet traffic, which grew at 23% this year, is as robust as ever.
To determine the traffic trends over time, we first established a baseline, calculated as the average daily traffic volume (excluding bot traffic) over the second full calendar week (January 9-15) of 2022. We chose the second calendar week to allow time for people to get back into their “normal” routines (school, work, etc.) after the winter holidays and New Year’s Day. The percent change shown on the trend lines in our charts are calculated relative to the baseline value, and represents a seven-day trailing average — it does not represent absolute traffic volume for a location. The seven-day averaging is done to smooth the sharp changes seen with a daily granularity.
In addition to calculating traffic growth, our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver and broad global customer base enables us to have a unique view into online activity. This includes insights into the most popular types of Internet content and the most popular Internet services in general and across specific categories, as well as the impact of bots. Of course, none of this matters if connectivity is unavailable, so we also drill down into major Internet disruptions observed in 2022.
Traffic trends
After an initial dip, worldwide Internet traffic saw nominal growth coinciding with the 2022 Olympic Winter Games in Beijing, but slipped again in the weeks after their conclusion. After a couple of months of slight growth, traffic again dipped below baseline heading into July. However, after reaching that nadir, Internet traffic experienced a fairly consistent rate of growth through the back part of the year. An upwards inflection at the end of November is visible in the worldwide traffic graph as well as the traffic graphs of a number of locations. Traffic analysis showed that this increase resulted from the convergence of early holiday shopping traffic (to e-commerce sites) with the run-up to and early days of FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.
The An Update on Cloudflare’s assistance to Ukraine blog post published during Impact Week looked at the conflict from an attack perspective. Viewing Ukraine through an Internet traffic lens provides unique insights into the impacts of the war’s damage and destruction to Internet connectivity within the country. After starting the year with some nominal traffic growth, that trend was quickly reversed once the Russian invasion began on February 24, with traffic quickly falling as infrastructure was damaged and the populace focused on finding safety and shelter. Although traffic started to grow again after that initial steep decline, drops in May and June appear to be correlated with significant outages observed by Cloudflare. After returning to growth during August, several additional disruptions were visible in September, October, and November coincident with widespread power outages across the country resulting from Russian attacks.
Reliable electric power is critical for reliable Internet connectivity, both for the core network infrastructure in data centers, as well as for last-mile infrastructure like cell towers and Wi-Fi routers, as well as laptops, cellphones, and other devices used to access the Internet. For several years, the residents of Puerto Rico have struggled to contend with an unreliable electric grid, resulting in frequent power outages and slow restoration times. In 2022, the island suffered two multi-day power outages that clearly impacted otherwise strong traffic growth. In April, a fire at a power plant caused an outage that lasted three days, disrupting Internet connectivity during that period. In September, widespread power outages resulting from damage from Hurricane Fiona resulted in a rapid drop in Internet traffic with the disruption lasting over a week until power restoration work and infrastructure repair was completed.
Top categories
Cloudflare’s global customer base spans a range of industry categories, including technology, e-commerce, and entertainment, among others. Analysis of the traffic to our customers’ websites and applications reveals which categories of content were most popular throughout the year, and can be broken out by user location. The domains associated with each customer zone have one or more associated categories — these can be viewed on Cloudflare Radar. To calculate the distribution of traffic across the set of categories for each location, we divided the number of requests for domains associated with a given category seen over the course of a week by the total number of requests mapped to a category seen over that week, filtering out bot traffic. If a domain is associated with multiple categories, then the associated request was included in the aggregate count for each category. The chart shows how the distribution of requests across the selected categories changes over the course of the year.
Globally, sites in the Technology category were the most popular, accounting for approximately one-third of traffic throughout the year. The next most popular category was Business & Economy, which drove approximately 15% of traffic. Shopping & Auctions also saw a bump in traffic in November, as consumers began their holiday shopping.
In sharp contrast to other Asian countries, in South Korea, Internet Communication was consistently the second most popular category during the year. Elsewhere, Internet Communication was occasionally among the top five, but usually within the top 10. Internet Communication was followed closely by Entertainment and Business & Economy. The former saw multiple periods of increased traffic through the year, in contrast to other categories, which saw traffic share remain fairly consistent over time.
Traffic distribution in Turkey represented a rare departure from most other locations around the world. Although Technology started the year as the most popular category, its popularity waned during the back half of the year, ending below Shopping & Auctions and Society & Lifestyle. These latter two saw gradual growth starting in September, and posted larger increases in November. Business & Economy and Entertainment sites were comparatively less popular here, in contrast to many other locations.
Armenia’s traffic distribution also ran counter to that seen in most other locations. Entertainment was the most popular category for nearly the entire year, except for the final week of November. Technology was generally the second most popular category, although it was surpassed by Gambling several times throughout the year. However, Gambling saw its popularity fall significantly in November, as it was surpassed by the Shopping & Auctions and Business & Economy categories.
Most popular Internet services
The luxury of being a popular Internet service is that the service’s brand becomes very recognizable, so it will be no surprise that Google was #1 in our General ranking.
Top 10 — General, late 2022 ranking 1. Google 2. Facebook 3. Apple, TikTok (tie) 5. YouTube 6. Microsoft 7. Amazon Web Services 8. Instagram 9. Amazon 10. iCloud, Netflix, Twitter, Yahoo (tie)
Last year TikTok was at the top of our ranking. However, the results between the two years aren’t comparable. As part of our launch of Radar 2.0, we introduced improvements to our domain ranking algorithms, and this year’s rankings are based on those new algorithms. In addition, this year we have grouped domains that all belong to a single Internet service. For example, Google operates google.com, google.pt, and mail.google.com among others, so we aggregated the popularity of each domain under a single “Google” Internet service for simplicity. However, while Meta operates both Facebook and Instagram, consumers typically perceive those brands as distinct, so we decided to group domains associated with those services separately.
Zooming out from our General top 10, the anonymized DNS query data from our 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver reflects traffic from millions of users around the world, enabling us to offer category specific rankings as well. While you can view them all in the “Most popular Internet services” section of our Year in Review website, we’ve decided to highlight a few of our favorite observations below.
Cryptocurrencies always seem to have as much promise as they have controversy. We couldn’t help but be curious about which cryptocurrency services were the most popular. But before jumping into the Top 10, let’s double-click on one that fell out of the running: FTX. Known as the third largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, our popularity ranking shows it hovered around 9th place for most of the year. That is, until it filed for bankruptcy in November. At that point, there is a precipitous drop, which also appears to coincide with reports that FTX disabled its users’ ability to make cryptocurrency withdrawals. Moving back to the Top 10, the two other major cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance and Coinbase, ranked #1 and #3 respectively and don’t appear to have been adversely impacted by FTX in our rankings.
The universe has been the hottest place to be since the beginning of time, but some suggest that we’ll all soon be in the metaverse. If that’s true, then the question becomes “Whose metaverse?”. Last year, Facebook changed its name to Meta as it poured billions of dollars into the space, so we were curious about the impact of their efforts on the metaverse landscape one year later. With Meta’s Oculus offering their initial foray into the metaverse, our data indicates that while its popularity saw tangible improvements, rising from 10th to 5th in the back half of the year, Roblox is clearly the champion of the metaverse arena. It is fascinating to see this smaller challenger dominating Oculus, which is operated by Meta, a company ~18x larger in market capitalization. We are excited to check back at the end of 2023 to see whether Oculus’ ascent of the rankings topples Roblox, or if the smaller player retains the crown.
Facebook’s transition to Meta, however, does not appear to have impacted its popularity as a social media platform. Within our ranking of the top social media platforms, Facebook held the top position throughout the year. TikTok and Snapchat also held steady in their places among the top five. Instagram and Twitter traded places several times mid-year, but the photo and video sharing app ultimately knocked Twitter from 3rd place in August. More active volatility was seen in the bottom half of the top 10, as LinkedIn, Discord, and Reddit frequently shifted between sixth, seventh, and eighth position in the rankings.
While those are the most popular sites today, over the last 20+ years, the landscape of social media platforms has been quite dynamic, with new players regularly emerging. Some gained a foothold and became successful, while others became a footnote of Internet history. Although it has actually been around since 2016, Mastodon emerged as the latest potential disruptor in the space. In a landscape where the top social media platforms operate closed-source, centralized platforms, Mastodon offers free, open source software to allow anyone to start their own social networking platform, built around a decentralized architecture, and easily federated with others.
Aggregating the domain names used by 400 top Mastodon instances, this cohort started the year hovering around the #200 rank of most popular services overall. Its position in the overall rankings steadily improved throughout the year, hitting an inflection point in November, moving up about 60 positions. This trend appears to be driven by a spike in interest and usage of Mastodon, which we elaborate on in the Adoption section below.
Bot traffic
Bot traffic describes any non-human traffic to a website or an app. Some bots are useful, such as those that monitor site and application availability or search engine bots that index content for search, and Cloudflare maintains a list of verified bots known to perform such services. However, visibility into other non-verified bot activity is just as, if not more, important as they may be used to perform malicious activities, such as breaking into user accounts or scanning the web for exposed vulnerabilities to exploit. To calculate bot traffic percentages, we used the bot score assigned to each request to identify those made by bots, and then divided the total number of daily requests from these bots by the total number of daily requests. These calculations were done both globally and on a per-location basis. The line shown in the trends graph represents a seven-day trailing average. For the top 10 chart, we calculated the average bot percentage on a monthly basis per location, and then ranked the locations by percentage. The chart illustrates the ranking by month, and how those rankings change across the year.
Globally, bots generally accounted for between 30-35% of traffic over the course of the year. Starting January at around 35%, the percentage of bot traffic dropped by nearly a quarter through the end of February, but then reclaimed some of that loss, staying just above 30% through October. A slight downward trend is evident at the start of November, due to human traffic increasing while bot traffic remained fairly consistent. Despite a couple of nominal spikes/drops, the global trend exhibited fairly low volatility overall throughout the year.
While around one-third of global traffic was from bots, two locations stood out with bot traffic percentages double the global level. Except for two brief mid-year spikes, just under 70% of traffic from Ireland was classified as bot-driven. Similarly, in Singapore, bot traffic consistently ranged between 60-70% across the year. Bots account for the majority share of traffic from these locations due to the presence of local “regions” from multiple cloud platform providers in each. Because doing so is easily automated and free/inexpensive, attackers will frequently spin up ephemeral instances in these clouds in order to launch high volume attacks, such as we saw with the “Mantis” attack in June. (Internal traffic analysis indicates that a significant portion of traffic for these two geographies is from cloud provider networks and that the vast majority of traffic we see from these networks is classified as bot traffic.)
The top 10 list of locations with the highest percentage of bot traffic saw a fair amount of movement throughout the year, with four different locations holding the top slot at some point during the year, although Turkmenistan spent the most time at the top of the list. Overall, 17 locations held a spot among the top 10 at some point during 2022, with greater concentrations in Europe and Asia.
Internet outages
Although the metrics included in the 2022 Year In Review were ultimately driven by Internet traffic to Cloudflare from networks and locations around the world, there are, unfortunately, times when traffic is disrupted. These disruptions can have a number of potential causes, including natural disasters and extreme weather, fiber optic cable cuts, or power outages. However, they can also happen when authoritarian governments order Internet connectivity to be shutdown at a network, regional, or national level.
We saw examples of all of these types of Internet disruptions, and more, during 2022, and aggregated coverage of them in quarterly overview blog posts. With the launch of Radar 2.0 in September, we also began to catalog them on the Cloudflare Radar Outage Center. These disruptions are most often visible as drops in Cloudflare traffic from a given network, region, or country. The 2022 Year In Review website illustrates where these disruptions occurred throughout the year. Some notable outages observed during 2022 are highlighted below.
One of the most significant Internet disruptions of the year took place on AS812 (Rogers), one of Canada’s largest Internet service providers. During the morning of July 8, a near complete loss of traffic was observed, and it took nearly 24 hours for traffic volumes to return to normal levels. A Cloudflare blog post covered the Rogers outage in real-time as the provider attempted to restore connectivity. Data from APNIC estimates that as many as five million users were directly affected, while press coverage noted that the outage also impacted phone systems, retail point of sale systems, automatic teller machines, and online banking services. According to a notice posted by the Rogers CEO, the outage was attributed to “a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction”.
Three of the major mobile network providers — AS44244 (Irancell), AS57218 (RighTel), and AS197207 (MCCI) — started implementing daily Internet “curfews” on September 21, generally taking place between 1600 and midnight local time (1230-2030 UTC), although the start times varied on several days. These regular shutdowns lasted into early October, with several more ad-hoc disruptions taking place through the middle of the month, as well as other more localized shutdowns of Internet connectivity. Over 75 million users were impacted by these shutdowns, based on subscriber figures for MCCI alone.
Cable cuts are also a frequent cause of Internet outages, with an old joke among network engineers that suggested that backhoes were the Internet’s natural enemy. While backhoes may be a threat to terrestrial fiber-optic cable, natural disasters can wreak havoc on submarine cables.
A prime example took Tonga offline earlier this year, 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 limited 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, but it was estimated that repairs to the domestic cable, connecting outlying islands, could take an additional six to nine months. We saw rapid growth in traffic from Tonga once the initial cable repairs were completed.
The war in Ukraine is now ten months old, and throughout the time it has been going on, multiple networks across the country have experienced outages. In March, we observed outages in Mariupol and other cities where fighting was taking place. In late May, an extended Internet disruption began in Kherson, coincident with AS47598 (Khersontelecom) starting to route traffic through Russian network provider AS201776 (MIranda), rather than a Ukrainian upstream. And in October, widespread power outages disrupted Internet connectivity in Kharkiv, Lviv, Kyiv, Poltova Oblast, and Zhytomyr. These outages and others were covered in more detail in the quarterly Internet disruption overview blog posts, as well as several other Ukraine-specific blog posts.
Adoption
Working with millions of websites and applications accessed by billions of people as well as providing an industry-leading DNS resolver service gives Cloudflare a unique perspective on the adoption of key technologies and platforms. SpaceX Starlink was frequently in the news this year, and we observed a 15x increase in traffic from the satellite Internet service provider. Social networking platform Mastodon was also in the news this year, and saw significant growth in interest as well.
IPv6 remains increasingly important as connected device growth over the last decade has exhausted available IPv4 address space, but global adoption remained around 35% across the year. And as the Internet-connected population continues to grow, many of those people are using mobile devices as their primary means of access. To that end, we also explore mobile device usage trends across the year.
Starlink adoption
Internet connectivity through satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) has been around for a number of years, but services have historically been hampered by high latency and slower speeds. However, the launch of SpaceX Starlink’sLow Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite Internet service in 2019 and subsequent expansion of the satellite constellation has made high performance Internet connections available in many locations that were previously unserved or underserved by traditional wired or wireless broadband. To track the growth in usage and availability of Starlink’s service, we analyzed aggregate Cloudflare traffic volumes associated with the service’s autonomous system (AS14593) throughout 2022. Although Starlink is not yet available globally, we did see traffic growth across a number of locations. The request volume shown on the trend line in the chart represents a seven-day trailing average.
Damage from the war in Ukraine has disrupted traditional wired and wireless Internet connectivity since the invasion started in late February. Starlink made headlines that month after the company activated service within the country, and the necessary satellite Internet terminals became more widely available. Within days, Cloudflare began to see Starlink traffic, with volume growing consistently throughout the year.
Latent interest in the service was also apparent in a number of locations where traffic grew quickly after Starlink announced availability. One such example is Romania, which was included in Starlink’s May announcement of an expanded service footprint, and which saw rapid traffic growth after the announcement.
And in the United States, where Starlink has provided service since launch, traffic grew more than 10x through the end of November. Service enhancements announced during the year, like the ability to get Internet connectivity from moving vehicles, boats, and planes will likely drive additional traffic growth in the future.
Mastodon interest
Above, we showed that Mastodon hit an inflection point in its popularity during the last few months of 2022. To better understand how interest in Mastodon evolved during 2022, we analyzed aggregate 1.1.1.1 request volume data for the domain names associated with 400 top Mastodon instances, looking at aggregate request volume by location. The request volume shown on the trend line in the chart represents a seven-day trailing average.
Although interest in Mastodon clearly accelerated over the last few months of the year, this interest was unevenly distributed throughout the world as we saw little to no traffic across many locations. Graphs for those locations are not included within the Year In Review website. However, because Mastodon has been around since 2016, it built a base of early adopters over the last six years before being thrust into the spotlight in 2022.
Those early adopters are visible at a global level, as we see a steady volume of resolver traffic for the analyzed Mastodon instance domain names through the first nine months of the year, with the timing of the increase visible in late April aligning with the announcement that Elon Musk had reached a deal to acquire Twitter for $44 billion. The slope of the graph clearly shifted in October as it became increasingly clear that the acquisition would close shortly, with additional growth into November after the deal was completed. This growth is likely due to a combination of existing but dormant Mastodon accounts once again becoming active, and an influx of new users.
The traffic pattern observed for the United States appears fairly similar to the global pattern, with traffic from an existing set of users seeing massive growth starting in late October as well.
Although the core Mastodon software was developed by a programmer living in Germany, and the associated organization is incorporated as a German not-for-profit, it didn’t appear to have any significant home field advantage. Query volume for Germany was relatively low throughout most of the year, and only started to rapidly increase at the end of October, similar to behavior observed in a number of other countries.
On a global basis, IPv6 adoption hovered around the 35% mark throughout the year, with nominal growth evident in the trend line shown in the graph. While it is encouraging to see one of every three requests for dual stacked content being made over IPv6, this adoption rate demonstrates a clear opportunity for improvement.
To calculate IPv6 adoption for each location, we identified the set of customer zones that had IPv6 enabled (were “dual stacked”) during 2022, and then divided the daily request count for the zones over IPv6 by the daily sum of IPv4 and IPv6 requests for the zones, filtering out bot traffic in both cases. The line shown in the trends graph represents a seven-day trailing average. For the top 10 chart, we calculated the average IPv6 adoption level on a monthly basis per location, and then ranked the locations by percentage. The chart illustrates the ranking by month, and how those rankings change across the year.
One location that has seized that opportunity is India, which recorded the highest IPv6 adoption rate throughout the year. After seeing more than 70% adoption through July, it began to drop slightly in late summer, losing a couple of percentage points over the subsequent months.
One key driver behind India’s leadership in this area is IPv6 support from Jio, India’s largest mobile network operator, as well as being a provider of fiber-to-the-home broadband connectivity. They aggressively started their IPv6 journey in late 2015, and now much of Jio’s core network infrastructure is IPv6-only, while customer-facing mobile and fiber connections are dual-stacked.
Also heading in the right direction are the more than 60 locations around the world that saw IP adoption rates more than double this year. One of the largest increases was seen in the European country of Georgia, which grew more than 3,500% to close out the year at 10% adoption thanks to rapid growth across February and March at Magticom, a leading Georgian telecommunications provider.
Many of the other locations in this set also experienced large gains over a short period of time, likely due to a local network provider enabling subscriber support for IPv6. While significant gains seen in over a quarter of the total surveyed locations is certainly a positive sign, it must be noted that over 50 are under 10% adoption, with more than half of those remaining well under 1%, even after seeing adoption more than double. Internet service providers around the world continue to add or improve IPv6 support for their subscribers, but many have low to non-existent adoption rates, presenting significant opportunity to improve in the future.
As noted above, India had the highest level of IPv6 adoption through 2022. In looking at the remainder of the top 10 list, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia traded places several times during the year as the locations with the second and third-highest adoption rates, at just under 60% and around 55% respectively. The United States appeared towards the bottom of the top 10 list during the first quarter, but ranked lower for the remainder of the year. Belgium proved to be the most consistent, holding the fourth-place spot from March through November, with around 55% IPv6 adoption. Overall, a total of 14 locations appeared among the top 10 at some point during the year.
Mobile device usage
Each year, mobile devices become more and more powerful, and are increasingly being used as the primary onramp to the Internet in many places. In fact, in some parts of the world, so-called “desktop” devices (which includes laptop form factors) are the exception for Internet access, not the rule.
Analysis of the information included with each content request enables us to classify the type of device (mobile or desktop) used to make the request. To calculate the percentage of mobile device usage by location, we divided the number of requests made by mobile devices over the course of a week by the total number of requests seen that week, filtering out bot traffic in both cases. For the top 10 chart, we ranked the locations by the calculated percentage. The chart illustrates the ranking by month, and how those rankings change across the year.
In looking at the top 10 chart, we note that Iran and Sudan held the top two slots for much of the year, bookended by Yemen in January and Mauritania in November. Below the top two spots, however, significant volatility is clear throughout the year within the rest of the top 10. However, this movement was actually concentrated across a relatively small percentage range, with just five to ten percentage points separating the top and bottom ranked locations, depending on the week. The top ranked locations generally saw 80-85% of traffic from mobile devices, while the bottom ranked locations saw 75-80% of traffic from mobile devices.
This analysis reinforces the importance of mobile connectivity in Iran, and underscores why mobile network providers were targeted for Internet shutdowns in September and October, as discussed above. (And the shutdowns subsequently explain why Iran disappears from the top 10 list after September.)
Security
Improving Internet security is a key part of Cloudflare’s drive to help build a better Internet. One way we do that is by protecting customer websites, applications, and network infrastructure from malicious traffic and attacks. Because malicious actors regularly use a variety of techniques and approaches in launching their attacks, we have a number of products within our security solution portfolio that provide customers with flexibility around how they handle these attacks. Below, we explore insights derived from the attack mitigation we do on behalf of customers, including how we are mitigating attacks, what kinds of websites and applications attacks are targeting, and where these attacks appear to be coming from. In addition, with the acquisition of Area 1 earlier in 2022, we are presenting insight into where malicious email originates from. Analysis of this data highlights that there is very much no “one size fits all” security solution, as attackers use a wide variety of techniques, frequently shifting between them. As such, having a broad but flexible portfolio of security solutions at the ready is critical for CISOs and CIOs.
Mitigation sources
Depending on the approach taken by an attacker, and the type of content being targeted, one attack mitigation technique may be preferable over another. Cloudflare refers to these techniques as “mitigation sources”, and they include popular tools and techniques like Web Application Firewall (WAF) and DDoS Mitigation (DDoS), but also lesser known ones like IP Reputation (IPR), Access Rules (AR), Bot Management (BM), and API Shield (APIS). Examining the distribution of mitigation sources applied by location can help us better understand the types of attacks originating from those locations. To calculate the percentage of mitigated traffic associated with each mitigation source by location, we divided the total number of daily mitigated requests for each source by the total number of mitigated requests seen that day. Bot traffic is included in these calculations, given that many attacks originate from bots. A single request can be mitigated by multiple techniques, and here we consider the last technique that mitigated the request.
Across many locations, IP Reputation, Bot Management, and Access Rules accounted for small amounts of mitigated traffic throughout the year, with the volumes varying by country. However, in other locations, IP Reputation and Access Rules were responsible for larger amounts of mitigated traffic, possibly indicating those places had more of their traffic being blocked outright. A number of countries saw a rapid and significant increase in DDoS mitigated traffic during January to the 80-90% range, followed by a rapid drop to the 10-20% range. In that vein, DDoS Mitigation and WAF percentage shifts were frequently very spiky, with only occasional sustained periods of relatively consistent percentages.
Overall, DDoS Mitigation and WAF were the two most frequently used techniques to address attacks. The former’s share on a global basis was highest in mid-January, growing to nearly 80%, while the latter’s peak was during February, when it accounted for almost 60% of mitigated traffic. A spike in the usage of Access Rules is clearly visible in August, related to similar spikes observed for the United States, United Arab Emirates, and Malaysia.
Although Access Rules accounted for as much as 20% of mitigated traffic from the United States in August, it saw much lower usage throughout the balance of the year. DDoS Mitigation was the primary technique used to mitigate attack traffic coming from the United States, responsible for over 80% of such traffic during the first quarter, though it steadily declined through August. In a complimentary fashion, WAF drove only ~20% of mitigated traffic early in the year, but that volume steadily grew and had tripled through August. Interestingly, the growth in Access Rules usage followed rapid growth and then similarly rapid decline in WAF, possibly suggesting that more targeted rules were implemented to augment the managed rules applied by the Web Application Firewall against US-originated attacks.
Access Rules and IP Reputation were applied more frequently to mitigate attack traffic coming from Germany, with Bot Management also seeing increased usage in February, March, and June. However, except for periods in February and July, DDoS Mitigation drove the bulk of mitigated traffic, generally ranging between 60-80%. WAF mitigation was clearly most significant during February, with 70-80% of mitigated traffic, and July, at around 60%.
In mitigating attacks coming from Japan, it is interesting to see a couple of notable spikes in Bot Management. In March, it was briefly responsible for upwards of 40% of mitigated traffic, with another spike that was half as big in June. Access Rules also maintained a consistent presence in the graph, with around 5% of mitigated traffic through August, but slightly less in the following months. In dealing with Japanese attack traffic, WAF & DDoS Mitigation frequently traded positions as the largest source of mitigated traffic, although there was no clear pattern or apparent cycle. Both reached as much as 90% of mitigated traffic at times throughout the year – WAF in February and DDoS Mitigation in March. DDoS Mitigation’s periods of “dominance” tended to be more sustained, lasting for several weeks, but were punctuated by brief WAF spikes.
WAF rules
As noted above, Cloudflare’s WAF is frequently used to mitigate application layer attacks. There are hundreds of individually managed rules that can be applied by the WAF depending on the characteristics of the mitigated request, but these rules can be grouped into over a dozen types. Examining the distribution of WAF rules by location can help us better understand the techniques that attacks coming from that location are using. (For example, are attackers trying to inject SQL code into a form field, or exploit a published CVE?) To calculate the distribution of WAF mitigated traffic across the set of rule types for each location, we divided the number of requests mitigated by a particular type of WAF rule seen over the course of a week by the total number of WAF mitigated requests seen over that week. A single request can be mitigated by multiple rules and here we consider the last rule in a sequence that mitigated the request. The chart shows how the distribution of mitigated requests across the selected rule types changes over the course of the year. Bot traffic is included in these calculations.
At a worldwide level, during the first few months of the year, approximately half of HTTP requests blocked by our Managed WAF Rules contained HTTP anomalies, such as malformed method names, null byte characters in headers, non-standard ports, or content length of zero with a POST request. During that period, Directory Traversal and SQL Injection (SQLi) rules both accounted for just over 10% of mitigated requests as well. Attackers began to further vary their approach starting in May, as Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and File Inclusion both grew to over 10% of mitigations, while HTTP anomalies dropped to below 30%. Use of Software Specific rules grew above 10% in July, as attackers apparently ramped their efforts to exploit vendor-specific vulnerabilities. Broken Authentication and Command Injection rulesets also saw some growth in activity during the last several months, suggesting that attackers increased their efforts to find vulnerabilities in login/authentication systems or to execute commands on vulnerable systems in an attempt to gain access.
Although HTTP Anomaly was the most frequently applied rule when mitigations are aggregated at a global level, there were a number of locations where it held the top spot only briefly, if at all, as discussed below.
Attacks originating in Australia were WAF-mitigated using a number of rulesets, with the most applied ruleset changing frequently during the first half of the year. In contrast to the global overview, HTTP Anomaly was the top ruleset for only a single week in February, when it accounted for just over 30% of mitigations. Otherwise, attacks were most frequently mitigated with Software Specific, Directory Traversal, File Inclusion, and SQLi rules, generally accounting for 25-35% of mitigations. This pattern shifted starting in July, though, as Directory Traversal attacks became the most common, staying that way through the balance of the year. After peaking in June, SQLi attacks became significantly less common, rapidly falling and staying below 10% of mitigations.
WAF mitigations of attacks originating in Canada also demonstrated a pattern that differed from the global one. Although the HTTP Anomaly ruleset started the year accounting for approximately two thirds of mitigated requests, it was half that by the end of January, and saw significant volatility throughout the balance of the year. SQLi mitigations of Australian traffic effectively saw an opposite pattern, starting the year below 10% of mitigations but growing rapidly, accounting for 60% or more of mitigated traffic at multiple times throughout the year. Interestingly, SQLi attacks from Canada appeared to come in multi-week waves, becoming the most applied ruleset during those waves, and then receding for a brief period.
For attacks originating in Switzerland, the HTTP Anomaly ruleset was never the most frequently invoked, although it remained among the top five throughout the year. Instead, Directory Traversal and XSS rules were most frequently used, accounting for as much as 40% of mitigations. Directory Traversal most consistently held the top spot, though XSS attacks were the most prevalent during August. SQLi attacks saw peaks in April, July/August, and then again at the end of November. The Software Specific ruleset also breakout growth in September to as much as 20% of mitigated requests.
Target categories
Above, we discussed how traffic distribution across a set of categories provides insights into the types of content that users are most interested in. By performing similar analysis through a mitigation lens, we can gain insights into the types of websites and applications that are being most frequently targeted by attackers. To calculate the distribution of mitigated traffic across the set of categories for each location, we divided the number of mitigated requests for domains associated with a given category seen over the course of a week by the total number of requests mapped to that category during that week. The chart shows how the distribution of mitigated requests across each category changes over the course of the year. (As such, percentages will not sum to 100%). Bot traffic is included in these calculations. The percentage of traffic that was mitigated as an attack varied widely across industries and originating locations. In some places, a nominal percentage of traffic across all categories was mitigated, while in others, multiple categories experienced spikes in mitigated traffic at multiple times during 2022.
When aggregated at a global level, there was significant variance over the course of the year in the industry categories that attracted the most attacks as a fraction of their overall traffic. Through January and February, Technology sites had the largest percentage of mitigated requests, ranging between 20-30%. After that, a variety of categories moved in and out of the top slot, with none holding it for more than a few weeks. The biggest spike in attacks was targeted at Travel sites in mid-April, when more than half of the category’s traffic was mitigated. Coincident with the start of the 2022 World Cup in the last week of November, Gambling and Entertainment sites saw the largest percentages of mitigated traffic.
For attacks coming from the United Kingdom, Technology sites consistently saw around 20% of mitigated traffic through the year. During those times that it was not the most mitigated category, half a dozen other categories topped the list. Travel sites experienced two significant bursts of attacks, with nearly 60% of traffic mitigated in April, and nearly 50% in October. Other categories, including Government & Politics, Real Estate, Religion, and Education had the largest shares of mitigated traffic at various times throughout the year. UK-originated attacks on Entertainment sites jumped significantly in late November, with 40% of traffic mitigated at the end of the month.
Similar to the trends seen at the global level, Technology sites accounted for the largest percentage of mitigated attacks from the United States in January and February, clocking in between 30-40%. After that, attackers shifted their focus to target other industry categories. In mid-April, Travel sites had over 60% of requests mitigated as attacks. However, starting in May, Gambling sites most frequently had the highest percentage of traffic being mitigated, generally ranging between 20-40%, but spiking up to 70% in late October/early November.
In contrast, significantly smaller percentages of traffic across the surveyed categories from Japan was mitigated as attacks throughout 2022. Most categories saw mitigation shares of less than 10%, although there were a number of brief spikes observed at times. In late March, traffic to sites in the Government & Politics category briefly jumped to a nearly 80% mitigation share, while Travel sites spiked to nearly 70% of requests mitigated as attacks, similar to the behavior seen in other locations. In late June, Religion sites had a mitigation share of over 60%, and a couple of months later, Gambling sites experienced a rapid increase in mitigated traffic, reaching just over 40%. These attacks targeting Gambling sites then receded for a few months before starting to aggressively increase again in October.
Phishing email sources
Phishing emails are ultimately intended to trick users into providing attackers with login credentials for important websites and applications. At a consumer level, this could include an e-commerce site or banking application, while for businesses, this could include code repositories or employee information systems. For customers protected by Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security, we can identify the location that these phishing emails are being sent from. IP address geolocation is used to identify origination location, and the aggregate email counts apply to emails processed by Area 1 only. For the top 10 chart, we aggregated the number of phishing emails seen on a weekly basis per location, and then ranked the locations by phishing email volume. The chart illustrates the ranking by week, and how those rankings change across the year.
Reviewing the top 10 list, we find that the United States was the top source of phishing emails observed by Area 1 during 2022. It held the top spot for nearly the entire year, ceding it only once to Germany in November. The balance of the top 10 saw a significant amount of volatility over time, with a total of 23 locations holding a spot in the rankings for at least one month during the year. These locations were well-distributed geographically across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, highlighting that no one region of the world is a greater threat than others. Obviously, distrusting or rejecting all email originating from these locations is not a particularly practical response, but applying additional scrutiny can help keep your organization, and the Internet, safer.
Conclusion
Attempting to concisely summarize our “year in review” observations is challenging, especially as we only looked at trends in this blog post across a small fraction of the nearly 200 locations included in the website’s visualizations. Having said that, we will leave you with the following brief thoughts:
Attack traffic comes from everywhere, with constantly shifting targets, using widely varied techniques. Ensure that your security solutions provider offers a comprehensive portfolio of services to help keep your sites, applications, and infrastructure safe.
Internet service providers around the world need to improve support for IPv6 — it is no longer a “new” technology, and available IPv4 address space will become both increasingly scarce and increasingly expensive. Support for IPv6 needs to become the default going forward.
Internet shutdowns are being increasingly used by governments to limit communications within a country, as well as limiting communications with the rest of the world. As the United Nations stated in a May 2022 report, “Blanket shutdowns in particular inherently impose unacceptable consequences for human rights and should never be imposed.”
As we said in the introduction, we encourage you to visit the full Cloudflare Radar 2022 Year In Review website and explore the trends relevant to locations and industries of interest, and to consider how they impact your organization so that you are appropriately prepared for 2023.
It truly took a village to produce the Cloudflare Radar 2022 Year In Review, and we would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge the contributions of colleagues that were instrumental in making this project possible. Thank you to: Sabina Zejnilovic, Carlos Azevedo, Jorge Pacheco (Data Science); Ricardo Baeta, Syeef Karim (Design); Nuno Pereira, Tiago Dias, Junior Dias de Oliveira (Front End Development); João Tomé (Most popular Internet services); and Davide Marques, Paula Tavares, Celso Martinho (Project/Engineering Management).
“The more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for.”
— Norman Vincent Peale, American author
The turkey. The sweet potatoes. The stuffing. The pumpkin pie. Yesterday, November 24, 2022, was Thanksgiving Day in the US. A time for families and loved ones to be together and thankful, according to the tradition. Last year, we saw how the US paused shopping (and browsing) for Thanksgiving. So, how was it this year? Not only did we see Internet traffic go down (by 13%) during Thanksgiving dinner, but it was much higher than usual the day before and the day after (the Black Friday effect… so far). There was also a clear, but short, Thanksgiving day effect on e-commerce DNS trends.
We’ll have to wait to see what Black Friday looks like.
Let’s start with Internet traffic at the time of Thanksgiving dinner. Although every family is different, a 2018 survey of US consumers showed that for 42% early afternoon (between 13:00 and 15:00 is the preferred time to sit at the table and start to dig in). But 16:00 seems to be the “correct time” — The Atlantic explains why.
That said, Cloudflare Radar shows that between 21:00 and 01:00 UTC (we use that as the standard timezone in Radar) there was a clear drop in Internet traffic, mostly between 21:00 and 22:00 UTC, when traffic dropped 13%, compared with the week before. That time period is “translated” for the East Coast to between 16:00 and 20:00 EST and for the West Coast the time between 13:00 to 17:00 PST. Similar to what we saw last year.
Radar also allows anyone to focus on the last 24 hours and check the traffic volume change compared with the previous period. The more granular view in the next graph shows not only the 13% drop during Thanksgiving dinner, but also the clear increase after. At around 01:00 EST (22:00 PST), traffic was 15% higher than the day before, and today, November 25, Black Friday morning (08:00 EST, 05:00 PST), was growing ~16% more in traffic at 09:00 EST (06:00 PST).
It’s a similar perspective when we look at the last seven days, a filter that also shows the night before Thanksgiving in the US, traffic was 15% higher than the week before at around 01:00-03:00 EST (22:00-00:00 PST). And there’s a general increase in traffic this week, probably related to the fact it is also “Black Friday Week” (more on e-commerce trends at the end).
In terms of Internet traffic growth (made by humans, not bots) in November, there’s a clear increase throughout the month, but mostly this week. The next chart aggregates traffic by day. So far, Tuesday, November 22, 2022, was the day of the month with most traffic in the US — +13% than what we saw on Tuesday, November 1.
It’s also clear in the previous graph that weekends in the US have less traffic, especially Saturdays, but that Thanksgiving Day was the one with less traffic of the past two weeks — 10% less traffic than the same day the week before.
We’ve been focused on human Internet traffic. Bots, on the other hand, are not that interested in the Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and there was actually more bot traffic in the US last week than in this one. So far.
To wrap up this Internet traffic section, let’s look at mobile device trends. In the last four weeks, we saw an average of 48% of Internet traffic in the US coming from mobile devices. But on Thanksgiving Day that average was 55%. That was actually the day in November when people in the US were most online using their mobile devices.
Here’s the view that shows the mobile percentage difference from the past two weeks, with an up to 9% increase (compared with the previous week) in mobile devices’ predominance in Internet traffic, between 10:00 and 16:00 EST (07:00-13:00 PST).
E-commerce interest: growing (but with a Thanksgiving dip)
Now, let’s look at DNS query trends (from our globally used 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver) to e-commerce websites in the US. First, the Thanksgiving Day effect.
Aggregating several e-commerce domains, we can see not only that there are several spikes in the last two weeks, but that during Thanksgiving, there was a clear dip in DNS traffic between 15:00 and 17:00 EST (12:00-14:00 PST). How much? At 17:00 EST, Thanksgiving Day, there was 13% less DNS traffic than in the previous week.
Using a smoothed seven day rolling average to those e-commerce domains (only in the US), the growth trend for the past 30 days is even more clear in the past two weeks (after a clear dip in early November). From November 13 to November 22, the rolling average grew ~5%.
Last year, Cyber Monday was the biggest day for online shopping, in terms of DNS queries that we saw. Next week, we’ll see how it was this year.
Japan: A different kind of Thanksgiving
Also this week, Japan had its Labor Thanksgiving, an annual public holiday that was celebrated on Wednesday, November 23, 2022. And there was also a clear impact, but because, in Japan, this is a day full of events held throughout the country, there was an increase in traffic during the day. How much?
The peak was at around 01:00 UTC (10:00 in local time), when Internet traffic was 60% higher than in the previous week (and it continued to remain high during Labor Thanksgiving Day).
You can check Cloudflare Radar, but also our Twitter account where we continue to see country patterns related to the FIFA World Cup in Qatar (Internet traffic does shift, depending on the country, when national teams are playing), but also e-commerce DNS trends.
Through Cloudflare’s Impact programs, we provide cyber security products to help protect access to authoritative voting information and the security of sensitive voter data. Two core programs in this space are the Athenian Project, dedicated to protecting state and local governments that run elections, and Cloudflare for Campaigns, a project with a suite of Cloudflare products to secure political campaigns’ and state parties’ websites and internal teams.
However, the weeks ahead of the elections, and Election Day itself, were not entirely devoid of attacks. Using data from Cloudflare Radar, which showcases global Internet traffic, attack, and technology trends and insights, we can explore traffic patterns, attack types, and top attack sources associated with both Athenian Project and Cloudflare for Campaigns participants.
For both programs, overall traffic volume unsurprisingly ramped up as Election Day approached. SQL Injection (SQLi) and HTTP Anomaly attacks were the two largest categories of attacks mitigated by Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF), and the United States was the largest source of observed attacks — see more on this last point below.
Below, we explore the trends seen across both customer sets from October 1, 2022, through Election Day on November 8.
Athenian Project
Throughout October, daily peak traffic volumes effectively doubled over the course of the month, with a weekday/weekend pattern also clearly visible. However, significant traffic growth is visible on Monday, November 7, and Tuesday, November 8 (Election Day), with Monday’s peak just under 2x October’s peaks, while Tuesday saw two peaks, one just under 4x higher than October peaks, while the other was just over 4x higher. Zooming in, the first peak was at 1300 UTC (0800 Eastern time, 0500 Pacific time), while the second was at 0400 UTC (2300 Eastern time, 2000 Pacific time). The first one appears to be aligned with the polls opening on the East Coast, while the second appears to be aligned with the time that the polls closed on the West Coast.
However, aggregating the traffic here presents a somewhat misleading picture. While both spikes were due to increased traffic across multiple customer sites, the second one was exacerbated by a massive increase in traffic for a single customer. Regardless, the increased traffic clearly shows that voters turned to local government sites around Election Day.
Despite this increase in overall traffic, attack traffic mitigated by Cloudflare’s Web Application Firewall (WAF) remained remarkably consistent throughout October and into November, as seen in the graph below. The obvious exception was an attack that occurred on Monday, October 10. This attack targeted a single Athenian Project participant, and was mitigated by rate limiting the requests.
SQL injection (SQLi) attacks saw significant growth in volume in the week and a half ahead of Election Day, along with an earlier significant spike on October 24. While the last weekend in October (October 29 and 30) saw significant SQLi attack activity, the weekend of November 5 and 6 was comparatively quiet. However, those attacks ramped up again heading into and on Election Day, as seen in the graph below.
Attempted attacks mitigated with the HTTP Anomaly ruleset also ramped up in the week ahead of Election Day, though to a much lesser extent than SQLi attacks. As the graph below shows, the biggest spikes were seen on October 31/November 1, and just after midnight UTC on November 4 (late afternoon to early evening in the US). Related request volume also grew heading into Election Day, but without significant short-duration spikes. There is also a brief but significant attack clearly visible on the graph on October 10. However, it occurred several hours after the rate limited attack referenced above — it is not clear if the two are related.
The distribution of attacks over the surveyed period from October 1 through November 9 shows that those categorized as SQLi and HTTP Anomaly were responsible for just over two-thirds of WAF-mitigated requests. Nearly 14% were categorized as “Software Specific,” which includes attacks related to specific CVEs. The balance of the attacks were mitigated by WAF rules in categories including File Inclusion, XSS (Cross Site Scripting), Directory Traversal, and Command Injection.
Media reports suggest that foreign adversaries actively try to interfere with elections in the United States. While this may be the case, analysis of the mitigated attacks targeting Athenian Project customers found that over 95% of the mitigated requests (attacks) came from IP addresses that geolocate to the United States. However, that does not mean that the attackers themselves are necessarily located in the country, but rather that they appear to be using compromised systems and proxies within the United States to launch their attacks against these sites protected by Cloudflare.
Cloudflare for Campaigns
In contrast to Athenian Project participants, traffic to candidate sites that are participants in Cloudflare for Campaigns began to grow several weeks ahead of Election Day. The graph below shows a noticeable increase (~50%) in peak traffic volumes starting on October 12, with an additional growth (50-100%) starting a week later. Traffic to these sites appeared to quiet a bit toward the end of October, but saw significant growth again heading into, and during, Election Day.
However, once again, this aggregate traffic data presents something of a misleading picture, as one candidate site saw multiple times more traffic than the other participating sites. While those other sites saw similar shifts in traffic as well, they were dwarfed by those experienced by the outlier site.
The WAF-mitigated traffic trend for campaign sites followed a similar pattern to the overall traffic. As the graph below shows, attack traffic also began to increase around October 19, with a further ramp near the end of the month. The October 27 spike visible in the graph was due to an attack targeting a single customer’s site, and was addressed using “Security Level” mitigation techniques, which uses IP reputation information to decide if and how to present challenges for incoming requests.
The top two rule categories, HTTP Anomaly and SQLi, together accounted for nearly three-quarters of the mitigated requests, and Directory Traversal attacks were just under 10% of mitigated requests for this customer set. The HTTP Anomaly and Directory Traversal percentages were higher than those for attacks targeting Athenian Project participants, while the SQLi percentage was slightly lower.
Once again, a majority of the WAF-mitigated attacks came from IP addresses in the United States. However, among Cloudflare for Campaigns participants, the United States only accounted for 55% of attacks, significantly lower than the 95% seen for Athenian Project participants. The balance is spread across a long tail of countries, with allies including Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom among the top five. As noted above, however, the attackers may be elsewhere, and are using botnets or other compromised systems in these countries to launch attacks.
Improving security with data
We are proud to be trusted by local governments, campaigns, state parties, and voting rights organizations to protect their websites and provide uninterrupted access to information and trusted election results. Sharing information about the threats facing these websites helps us further support their valuable work by enabling them, and other participants in the election space, to take proactive steps to improve site security.
Brasil, sei lá Ou o meu coração se engana Ou uma terra igual não há — From Tom Jobim’s song, Brasil Nativo
Brazil’s recent presidential election got significant attention from both global and national media outlets, not only because of the size of the country, but also because of premature allegations of electoral fraud. The first round of the Brazilian 2022 general election was held on October 2, and the runoff was held on Sunday, October 30. With 124 million votes counted, former president Lula da Silva (2003-2010) won with 50.9% of the votes, beating incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, who had 49.1% of the votes.
The final results of the elections as published by the official Tribunal Super Eleitoral, with more than 124 million votes counted.)
Using Cloudflare’s data, we can explore the impact that this election had on Internet traffic patterns in Brazil, as well as interest in content from election-related websites, news organizations, social media platforms, and video platforms.
Here are a few highlights: while the runoff generated much more interest to election related websites (we actually have a view to DNS queries, a proxy to websites), the first round showed bigger increases in traffic to news organizations.
For the candidate’s domains, Lula’s win had the higher impact.
Also: official results came earlier on the runoff than the first round, and spikes in traffic were higher earlier that day (October 30).
(Note: we’re using local times — that means UTC-3, that is related to the more populated regions of Brazil — in this blog, although some charts have x-axis UTC).
Let’s start by looking at general Internet traffic in Brazil.
On election days, traffic goes down (during the day)
Using Cloudflare Radar, we can see something that has also been observed in other countries that hold Sunday elections: when most people are getting outside to vote, Internet traffic goes down (in comparison with previous Sundays). We saw this in the two rounds of the Presidential elections in France back in April 2022, in Portugal’s legislative elections in January 2022 and now, in Brazil.
We can also compare Sundays in October. There were five weekends. The two that had elections show the same pattern of lower traffic during the day, as seen in the previous chart. Comparing the two election days, there was a bigger drop in traffic on October 30 (down 21% at around 18:00 local time), than on October 2 (down 10% at around 20:00). Related or not, there was a bigger turnout on the runoff (124 million votes) than on the first round (123 million). Here’s the view on October 30:
And here’s October 2:
A more clear view in comparing the October weekends, and where you can see how the October 2 and 30 Sundays have the same pattern and different from the others three of the month, is this one (bear in mind that the x-axis is showing UTC time, it’s -3 hours in Brazil):
If we look at the main network providers (ASNs) in Brazil, the trend is the same. Claro (AS28573) also shows the drop in traffic on October 30, as does Telefonica (AS27699):
Here’s Telefonica:
We observed a similar impact from the October 30 runoff election to traffic from different states in Brazil, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Norte, Minas Gerais, and Bahia.
Mobile device usage greater on weekends (and on election days)
When we look at the share of Brazil’s Internet traffic from mobile devices during October, we find that the highest percentages were on October 2 (first round of the elections, 66.3%), October 9 (66.4%) and October 30 (runoff election, 65%). We’ve seen this in other elections, an increase in mobile device traffice, so this seems to follow the same trend.
This chart also shows how mobile device usage in Brazil is at its highest on the weekends (all the main spikes for percentage of mobile devices are over the weekend, and more on Sundays).
Now, let’s look at anonymized and aggregated DNS traffic data from our 1.1.1.1 resolver. This data provides a proxy for traffic to, and thus interest in, different categories of sites from users in Brazil around the election.
Election-related sites: higher interest in the runoff
Brazil has government websites related to elections, but also its own Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (Electoral Superior Court) that includes a website and app with live updates on the results of the elections for everyone to check. Looking at those related domains and using mean hourly traffic in September as a baseline, we can see that the October 2 first round spiked to 16x more DNS queries at 20:00 local time. However, DNS query traffic during the runoff election peaked at 18:00 local time on October 30 with 17.4x more DNS traffic as compared to the September baseline.
We can look more closely at each one of those two election days. On October 2, traffic had its first significant increase at around 17:00 local time, reaching 15x more requests to election-related domains as compared to the September baseline. This initial peak occurred at the same time the polling stations were closing. However, the peak that day, at 16x above baseline, was reached at 20:00 local time, as seen in the figure below.
On Sunday, October 30, 2022, the pattern is similar, although the peak was reached earlier, given that results started to arrive earlier than on the first round. The peak was reached at around 18:00 local time, with request traffic 17.4x above baseline.
As seen in the figure below, Lula first led in the official results at 18:45 local time, with votes from 67% of the polling stations counted at that time. Around 20:00 Lula was considered the winner (the peak seen in the previous chart was at that time).
Candidate websites: in the end, winner takes all?
For Lula-related domains, there are clear spikes around the first round of elections on October 2. A 13x spike was observed on October 1 at around 21:00 local time. Two notable spikes were observed on October 2 — one at 16.7x above baseline at 09:00 local time, and the other at 10.7x above baseline at 21:00 local time. During the October 30 runoff election, only one clear spike was observed. The spike, at 16.7x above baseline, occurred at around 20:00, coincident with the time Lula was being announced as the winner.
For Bolsonaro-related domains, we observed a different pattern. Increased traffic as compared to the baseline is visible in the days leading up to the first round election, reaching 10x on September 30. On October 2, a 8x spike above baseline was seen at 18:00 local time. However, the two most significant spikes seen over the course of the month were observed on October 16, at 20x above baseline, a few hours after the first Lula-Bolsonaro television debate, and on October 25, at around 20:00, at 22x above baseline. That was the last week of campaigning before the October 30 runoff and when several polling predictions were announced. The second and last Bolsonaro-Lula debate was on October 28, and there’s a spike at 22:00 to Lula’s websites, and a smaller but also clear one at 21:00 to Bolsonaro’s websites).
News websites: more interest in the first round
With official election results being available more rapidly, DNS traffic for Brazilian news organization websites peaked much earlier in the evening than what we saw in France, for example, where more definitive election results arrived much later on election day. But another interesting trend here is how the first round, on October 2, had 9.1x more DNS traffic (compared with the September baseline), than what we saw during the runoff on October 30 (6.1x).
The way the results arrived faster also had an impact on the time of the peak, occurring at around 19:00 local time on October 30, as compared to around 20:00 on October 2.
At 19:45 local time on October 30, Lula was already the winner with more than 98% of the votes counted. After 20:00 there was a clear drop in DNS traffic to news organizations.
On October 2, it was only around 22:00 that it became official that there would be a runoff between Lula and Bolsonaro. Peak request volume was reached at 20:00 (9x), but traffic remained high (8x) at around 21:00 and until 22:00, like the following chart shows:
Conclusion: Real world events impact the Internet
Cloudflare Radar, our tool for Internet insights, can provide a unique perspective on how major global or national events impact the Internet. It is interesting to not only see that a real world event can impact Internet traffic (and different types of websites) for a whole country, but also see how much that impact is represented at specific times. It’s all about human behavior at relevant moments in time, like elections as a collective event is.
Welcome to our DDoS Threat Report for the third quarter of 2022. This report includes insights and trends about the DDoS threat landscape – as observed across Cloudflare’s global network.
Multi-terabit strong DDoS attacks have become increasingly frequent. In Q3, Cloudflare automatically detected and mitigated multiple attacks that exceeded 1 Tbps. The largest attack was a 2.5 Tbps DDoS attack launched by a Mirai botnet variant, aimed at the Minecraft server, Wynncraft. This is the largest attack we’ve ever seen from the bitrate perspective.
It was a multi-vector attack consisting of UDP and TCP floods. However, Wynncraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game Minecraft server where hundreds and thousands of users can play on the same server, didn’t even notice the attack, since Cloudflare filtered it out for them.
The 2.5 Tbps DDoS attack that targeted Wynncraft — launched by Mirai
General DDoS attack trends
Overall this quarter, we’ve seen:
An increase in DDoS attacks compared to last year.
Longer-lasting volumetric attacks, a spike in attacks generated by the Mirai botnet and its variants.
Surges in attacks targeting Taiwan and Japan.
Application-layer DDoS attacks
HTTP DDoS attacks increased by 111% YoY, but decreased by 10% QoQ.
HTTP DDoS attacks targeting Taiwan increased by 200% QoQ; attacks targeting Japan increased by 105% QoQ.
Reports of Ransom DDoS attacks increased by 67% YoY and 15% QoQ.
Network-layer DDoS attacks
L3/4 DDoS attacks increased by 97% YoY and 24% QoQ.
L3/4 DDoS attacks by Mirai botnets increased by 405% QoQ.
The Gaming / Gambling industry was the most targeted by L3/4 DDoS attacks including a massive 2.5 Tbps DDoS attack.
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.
Ransom attacks
Ransom DDoS attacks are attacks where the attacker demands a ransom payment, usually in the form of Bitcoin, to stop/avoid the attack. In Q3, 15% of Cloudflare customers that responded to our survey reported being targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks accompanied by a threat or a ransom note. This represents a 15% increase QoQ and 67% increase YoY of reported ransom DDoS attacks.
Distribution of Ransom DDoS attacks by quarter
Diving into Q3, we can see that since June 2022, there was a steady decline in reports of ransom attacks. However, in September, the reports of ransom attacks spiked again. In the month of September, almost one out of every four respondents reported receiving a ransom DDoS attack or threat — the highest month in 2022 so far.
Distribution of Ransom DDoS attacks by month
How we calculate Ransom DDoS attack trends 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, Cloudflare has been surveying attacked customers. One of the questions in the survey asks the respondents if they received a threat or a ransom note demanding payment in exchange to stop the DDoS attack. Over the past year, on average, we collected 174 responses per quarter. The responses of this survey are used to calculate the percentage of Ransom DDoS attacks.
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.
Application-layer DDoS attack trends
When we look at the graph below, we can see a clear trend of approximately 10% decrease in attacks each quarter since 2022 Q1. However, despite the downward trend, when comparing Q3 of 2022 to Q3 of 2021, we can see that HTTP DDoS attacks still increased by 111% YoY.
Distribution of HTTP DDoS attacks by quarter
When we dive into the months of the quarter, attacks in September and August were fairly evenly distributed; 36% and 35% respectively. In July, the amount of attacks was the lowest for the quarter (29%).
Distribution of HTTP DDoS attacks by month in 2022 Q3
Application-layer DDoS attacks by industry
By bucketing the attacks by our customers’ industry of operation, we can see that HTTP applications operated by Internet companies were the most targeted in Q3. Attacks on the Internet industry increased by 131% QoQ and 300% YoY.
The second most attacked industry was the Telecommunications industry with an increase of 93% QoQ and 2,317% (!) YoY. In third place was the Gaming / Gambling industry with a more conservative increase of 17% QoQ and 36% YoY.
Top industries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks in 2022 Q3
Application-layer DDoS attacks by target country
Bucketing attacks by our customers’ billing address gives us an understanding of which countries are more attacked. HTTP applications operated by US companies were the most targeted in Q3. US-based websites saw an increase of 60% QoQ and 105% YoY in attacks targeting them. After the US, was China with a 332% increase QoQ and an 800% increase YoY.
Looking at Ukraine, we can see that attacks targeting Ukrainian websites increased by 67% QoQ but decreased by 50% YoY. Furthermore, attacks targeting Russian websites increased by 31% QoQ and 2,400% (!) YoY.
In East Asia, we can see that attacks targeting Taiwanese companies increased by 200% QoQ and 60% YoY, and attacks targeting Japanese companies increased by 105% QoQ.
Top countries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks in 2022 Q3
When we zoom in on specific countries, we can identify the below trends that may reveal interesting insights regarding the war in Ukraine and geopolitical events in East Asia:
In Ukraine, we see a surprising change in the attacked industries. Over the past two quarters, Broadcasting, Online Media and Publishing companies were targeted the most in what appeared to be an attempt to silence information and make it unavailable to civilians. However, this quarter, those industries dropped out of the top 10 list. Instead, the Marketing & Advertising industry took the lead (40%), followed by Education companies (20%), and Government Administration (8%).
In Russia, attacks on the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) industry continue to persist (25%). Be that as it may, attacks on the BFSI sector still decreased by 44% QoQ. In second place is the Events Services industry (20%), followed by Cryptocurrency (16%), Broadcast Media (13%), and Retail (11%). A significant portion of the attack traffic came from Germany-based IP addresses, and the rest were globally distributed.
In Taiwan, the two most attacked industries were Online Media (50%) and Internet (23%). Attacks to those industries were globally distributed indicating the usage of botnets.
In Japan, the most attacked industry was Internet/Media & Internet (52%), Business Services (12%), and Government – National (11%).
Application-layer DDoS attack traffic by source country
Before digging into specific source country metrics, it is important to note that while country of origin is interesting, it is not necessarily indicative of where the attacker is located. Oftentimes with DDoS attacks, they are launched remotely, and attackers will go to great lengths to hide their actual location in an attempt to avoid being caught. If anything, it is indicative of where botnet nodes are located. With that being said, by mapping the attacking IP address to their location, we can understand where attack traffic is coming from.
After two consecutive quarters, China replaced the US as the main source of HTTP DDoS attack traffic. In Q3, China was the largest source of HTTP DDoS attack traffic. Attack traffic from China-registered IP addresses increased by 29% YoY and 19% QoQ. Following China was India as the second-largest source of HTTP DDoS attack traffic — an increase of 61% YoY. After India, the main sources were the US and Brazil.
Looking at Ukraine, we can see that this quarter there was a drop in attack traffic originating from Ukrainian and Russian IP addresses — a decrease of 29% and 11% QoQ, respectively. However, YoY, attack traffic from within those countries still increased by 47% and 18%, respectively.
Another interesting data point is that attack traffic originating from Japanese IP addresses increased by 130% YoY.
Top source countries of HTTP DDoS attacks in 2022 Q3
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.
Network-layer DDoS attack trends
In Q3, we saw a large surge in L3/4 DDoS attacks — an increase of 97% YoY and a 24% QoQ. Furthermore, when we look at the graph we can see a clear trend, over the past three quarters, of an increase in attacks.
Distribution of L3/4 DDoS attacks by quarter
Drilling down into the quarter, it’s apparent that the attacks were, for the most part, evenly distributed throughout the quarter — with a slightly larger share for July.
Distribution of L3/4 DDoS attacks by month in 2022 Q3
Network-layer DDoS attacks by Industry
The Gaming / Gambling industry was hit by the most L3/4 DDoS attacks in Q3. Almost one out of every five bytes Cloudflare ingested towards Gaming / Gambling networks was part of a DDoS attack. This represents a whopping 381% increase QoQ.
The second most targeted industry was Telecommunications — almost 6% of bytes towards Telecommunications networks were part of DDoS attacks. This represents a 58% drop from the previous quarter where Telecommunications was the top most attacked industry by L3/4 DDoS attacks.
Following were the Information Technology and Services industry along with the Software industry. Both saw significant growth in attacks — 89% and 150% QoQ, respectively.
Top industries targeted by L3/4 DDoS attacks in 2022 Q3
Network-layer DDoS attacks by target country
In Q3, Singapore-based companies saw the most L3/4 DDoS attacks — over 15% of all bytes to their networks were associated with a DDoS attack. This represents a dramatic 1,175% increase QoQ.
The US comes in second after a 45% decrease QoQ in attack traffic targeting US networks. In third, China, with a 62% QoQ increase. Attacks on Taiwan companies also increased by 200% QoQ.
Top countries targeted by L3/4 DDoS attacks in 2022 Q3
Network-layer DDoS attacks by ingress country
In Q3, Cloudflare’s data centers in Azerbaijan saw the largest percentage of attack traffic. More than a third of all packets ingested there were part of a L3/4 DDoS attack. This represents a 44% increase QoQ and a huge 59-fold increase YoY.
Similarly, our data centers in Tunisia saw a dramatic increase in attack packets – 173x the amount in the previous year. Zimbabwe and Germany also saw significant increases in attacks.
Zooming into East Asia, we can see that our data centers in Taiwan saw an increase of attacks — 207% QoQ and 1,989% YoY. We saw similar numbers in Japan where attacks increased by 278% QoQ and 1,921% YoY.
Looking at Ukraine, we actually see a dip in the amount of attack packets we observed in our Ukraine-based and Russia-based data centers — 49% and 16% QoQ, respectively.
Top Cloudflare data center locations with the highest percentage of DDoS attack traffic in 2022 Q3
Attack vectors & Emerging threats
An attack vector is the method used to launch the attack or the method of attempting to achieve denial-of-service. With a combined share of 71%, SYN floods and DNS attacks remain the most popular DDoS attack vectors in Q3.
Top attack vectors in 2022 Q3
Last quarter, we saw a resurgence of attacks abusing the CHARGEN protocol, the Ubiquity Discovery Protocol, and Memcached reflection attacks. While the growth in Memcached DDoS attacks also slightly grew (48%), this quarter, there was a more dramatic increase in attacks abusing the BitTorrent protocol (1,221%), as well as attacks launched by the Mirai botnet and its variants.
BitTorrent DDoS attacks increased by 1,221% QoQ The BitTorrent protocol is a communication protocol that’s used for peer to peer file sharing. To help the BitTorrent clients find and download the files efficiently, BitTorrent clients may use BitTorrent Trackers or Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) to identify the peers that are seeding the desired file. This concept can be abused to launch DDoS attacks. A malicious actor can spoof the victim’s IP address as a seeder IP address within Trackers and DHT systems. Then clients would request the files from those IPs. Given a sufficient number of clients requesting the file, it can flood the victim with more traffic than it can handle.
Mirai DDoS attacks increased by 405% QoQ Mirai is malware that infects smart devices that run on ARC processors, turning them into a network of bots that can be used to launch DDoS attacks. This processor runs a stripped-down version of the Linux operating system. If the default username-and-password combo is not changed, Mirai is able to log in to the device, infect it, and take over. The botnet operator can instruct the botnet to launch a flood of UDP packets at the victim’s IP address to bombard them.
Top emerging threats in 2022 Q3
Network-layer DDoS attacks by Attack Rates & Duration
While Terabit-strong attacks are becoming more frequent, they are still the outliers. The majority of attacks are tiny (in terms of Cloudflare scale). Over 95% of attacks peaked below 50,000 packets per second (pps) and over 97% below 500 Megabits per second (Mbps). We call this “cyber vandalism”.
What is cyber vandalism? As opposed to “classic” vandalism where the purpose is to cause deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private physical property — such as graffiti on the side of a building — in the cyberworld, cyber vandalism is the act of causing deliberate damage to Internet properties. Today the source codes for various botnets are available online and there are a number of free tools that can be used to launch a flood of packets. By directing those tools to Internet properties, any script-kid can use those tools to launch attacks against their school during exam season or any other website they desire to take down or disrupt. This is as opposed to organized crime, Advanced Persistent Threat actors, and state-level actors that can launch much larger and sophisticated attacks.
Distribution of DDoS attacks by bitrate in 2022 Q3
Similarly, most of the attacks are very short and end within 20 minutes (94%). This quarter we did see an increase of 9% in attacks of 1-3 hours, and a 3% increase in attacks over 3 hours — but those are still the outliers.
QoQ change in the duration of DDoS attacks in 2022 Q3
Even with the largest attacks, such as the 2.5 Tbps attack we mitigated earlier this quarter, and the 26M request per second attack we mitigated back in the summer, the peak of the attacks were short-lived. The entire 2.5 Tbps attack lasted about 2 minutes, and the peak of the 26M rps attack only 15 seconds. This emphasizes the need for automated, always-on solutions. Security teams can’t respond quick enough. By the time the security engineer looks at the PagerDuty notification on their phone, the attack has subsided.
Summary
Attacks may be initiated by humans, but they are executed by bots — and to play to win, you must fight bots with bots. Detection and mitigation must be automated as much as possible, because relying solely on humans puts defenders at a disadvantage. Cloudflare’s automated systems constantly detect and mitigate DDoS attacks for our customers, so they don’t have to.
Over the years, it has become easier, cheaper, and more accessible for attackers and attackers-for-hire to launch DDoS attacks. But as easy as it has become for the attackers, we want to make sure that it is even easier – and free – for defenders of organizations of all sizes to protect themselves against DDoS attacks of all types. We’ve been providing unmetered and unlimited DDoS protection for free to all of our customers since 2017 — when we pioneered the concept.
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.
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