Microsoft has a comprehensive report on the dozens of cyberattacks — and even more espionage operations — Russia has conducted against Ukraine as part of this war:
At least six Russian Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors and other unattributed threats, have conducted destructive attacks, espionage operations, or both, while Russian military forces attack the country by land, air, and sea. It is unclear whether computer network operators and physical forces are just independently pursuing a common set of priorities or actively coordinating. However, collectively, the cyber and kinetic actions work to disrupt or degrade Ukrainian government and military functions and undermine the public’s trust in those same institutions.
[…]
Threat groups with known or suspected ties to the GRU have continuously developed and used destructive wiper malware or similarly destructive tools on targeted Ukrainian networks at a pace of two to three incidents a week since the eve of invasion. From February 23 to April 8, we saw evidence of nearly 40 discrete destructive attacks that permanently destroyed files in hundreds of systems across dozens of organizations in Ukraine.
Welcome to our first DDoS report of 2022, and the ninth in total so far. This report includes new data points and insights both in the application-layer and network-layer sections — as observed across the global Cloudflare network between January and March 2022.
The first quarter of 2022 saw a massive spike in application-layer DDoS attacks, but a decrease in the total number of network-layer DDoS attacks. Despite the decrease, we’ve seen volumetric DDoS attacks surge by up to 645% QoQ, and we mitigated a new zero-day reflection attack with an amplification factor of 220 billion percent.
In the Russian and Ukrainian cyberspace, the most targeted industries were Online Media and Broadcast Media. In our Azerbaijan and Palestinian Cloudflare data centers, we’ve seen enormous spikes in DDoS activity — indicating the presence of botnets operating from within.
The Highlights
The Russian and Ukrainian cyberspace
Russian Online Media companies were the most targeted industries within Russia in Q1. The next most targeted was the Internet industry, then Cryptocurrency, and then Retail. While many attacks that targeted Russian Cryptocurrency companies originated in Ukraine or the US, another major source of attacks was from within Russia itself.
The majority of HTTP DDoS attacks that targeted Russian companies originated from Germany, the US, Singapore, Finland, India, the Netherlands, and Ukraine. It’s important to note that being able to identify where cyber attack traffic originates is not the same as being able to attribute where the attacker is located.
Attacks on Ukraine targeted Broadcast Media and Publishing websites and seem to have been more distributed, originating from more countries — which may indicate the use of global botnets. Still, most of the attack traffic originated from the US, Russia, Germany, China, the UK, and Thailand.
In January 2022, over 17% of under-attack respondents reported being targeted by ransom DDoS attacks or receiving a threat in advance.
That figure drastically dropped to 6% in February, and then to 3% in March.
When compared to previous quarters, we can see that in total, in Q1, only 10% of respondents reported a ransom DDoS attack; a 28% decrease YoY and 52% decrease QoQ.
Application-layer DDoS attacks
2022 Q1 was the busiest quarter in the past 12 months for application-layer attacks. HTTP-layer DDoS attacks increased by 164% YoY and 135% QoQ.
Diving deeper into the quarter, in March 2022 there were more HTTP DDoS attacks than in all of Q4 combined (and Q3, and Q1).
After four consecutive quarters in a row with China as the top source of HTTP DDoS attacks, the US stepped into the lead this quarter. HTTP DDoS attacks originating from the US increased by a staggering 6,777% QoQ and 2,225% YoY.
Network-layer DDoS attacks
Network-layer attacks in Q1 increased by 71% YoY but decreased 58% QoQ.
The Telecommunications industry was the most targeted by network-layer DDoS attacks, followed by Gaming and Gambling companies, and the Information Technology and Services industry.
Volumetric attacks increased in Q1. Attacks above 10 Mpps (million packets per second) grew by over 300% QoQ, and attacks over 100 Gbps grew by 645% QoQ.
This report is based on DDoS attacks that were automatically detected and mitigated by Cloudflare’s DDoS Protection systems. To learn more about how it works, check out this deep-dive blog post.
A note on how we measure DDoS attacks observed over our network To analyze attack trends, we calculate the “DDoS activity” rate, which is either the percentage of attack traffic out of the total traffic (attack + clean) observed over our global network, or in a specific location, or in a specific category (e.g., industry or billing country). Measuring the percentages allows us to normalize data points and avoid biases reflected in absolute numbers towards, for example, a Cloudflare data center that receives more total traffic and likely, also more attacks.
To view an interactive version of this report view it on Cloudflare Radar.
Ransom Attacks
Our systems constantly analyze traffic and automatically apply mitigation when DDoS attacks are detected. Each DDoS’d customer is prompted with an automated survey to help us better understand the nature of the attack and the success of the mitigation.
For over two years now, Cloudflare has been surveying attacked customers — one question on the survey being if they received a threat or a ransom note demanding payment in exchange to stop the DDoS attack. In the last quarter, 2021 Q4, we observed a record-breaking level of reported ransom DDoS attacks (one out of every five customers). This quarter, we’ve witnessed a drop in ransom DDoS attacks with only one out of 10 respondents reporting a ransom DDoS attack; a 28% decrease YoY and 52% decrease QoQ.
When we break it down by month, we can see that January 2022 saw the largest number of respondents reporting receiving a ransom letter in Q1. Almost one out of every five customers (17%).
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 attacks by month
In Q1, application-layer DDoS attacks soared by 164% YoY and 135% QoQ – the busiest quarter within the past year.
Application-layer DDoS attacks increased to new heights in the first quarter of 2022. In March alone, there were more HTTP DDoS attacks than in all of 2021 Q4 combined (and Q3, and Q1).
Application-layer DDoS attacks by industry
Consumer Electronics was the most targeted industry in Q1.
Globally, the Consumer Electronics industry was the most attacked with an increase of 5,086% QoQ. Second was the Online Media industry with a 2,131% increase in attacks QoQ. Third were Computer Software companies, with an increase of 76% QoQ and 1,472 YoY.
To understand the origin of the HTTP attacks, we look at the geolocation of the source IP address belonging to the client that generated the attack HTTP requests. Unlike network-layer attacks, source IP addresses cannot be spoofed in HTTP attacks. A high percentage of DDoS activity in a given country usually indicates the presence of botnets operating from within the country’s borders.
After four consecutive quarters in a row with China as the top source of HTTP DDoS attacks, the US stepped into the lead this quarter. HTTP DDoS attacks originating from the US increased by a staggering 6,777% QoQ and 2,225% YoY. Following China in second place are India, Germany, Brazil, and Ukraine.
Application-layer DDoS attacks by target country
In order to identify which countries are targeted by the most HTTP DDoS attacks, we bucket the DDoS attacks by our customers’ billing countries and represent it as a percentage out of all DDoS attacks.
The US drops to second place, after being first for three consecutive quarters. Organizations in China were targeted the most by HTTP DDoS attacks, followed by the US, Russia, and Cyprus.
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 attacks by month
While HTTP DDoS attacks soared in Q1, network-layer DDoS attacks actually decreased by 58% QoQ, but still increased by 71% YoY.
Diving deeper into Q1, we can see that the amount of network-layer DDoS attacks remained mostly consistent throughout the quarter with about a third of attacks occurring every month.
Amongst these network-layer DDoS attacks are also zero-day DDoS attacks that Cloudflare automatically detected and mitigated.
In the beginning of March, Cloudflare researchers helped investigate and expose a zero-day vulnerability in Mitel business phone systems that amongst other possible exploitations, also enables attackers to launch an amplification DDoS attack. This type of attack reflects traffic off vulnerable Mitel servers to victims, amplifying the amount of traffic sent in the process by an amplification factor of 220 billion percent in this specific case. You can read more about it in our recent blog post.
We observed several of these attacks across our network. One of them targeted a North American cloud provider using the Cloudflare Magic Transit service. The attack originated from 100 source IPs mainly from the US, UK, Canada, Netherlands, Australia, and approximately 20 other countries. It peaked above 50 Mpps (~22 Gbps) and was automatically detected and mitigated by Cloudflare systems.
In this report, for the first time, we’ve begun classifying network-layer DDoS attacks according to the industries of our customers using the Spectrum and Magic products. This classification allows us to understand which industries are targeted the most by network-layer DDoS attacks.
When we look at Q1 statistics, we can see that in terms of attack packets and attack bytes launched towards Cloudflare customers, the Telecommunications industry was targeted the most. More than 8% of all attack bytes and 10% of all attack packets that Cloudflare mitigated targeted Telecommunications companies.
Following not too far behind, in second and third place were the Gaming / Gambling and Information Technology and Services industries.
Network-layer DDoS attacks by target country
Similarly to the classification by our customers’ industry, we can also bucket attacks by our customers’ billing country as we do for application-layer DDoS attacks, to identify the top attacked countries.
Looking at Q1 numbers, we can see that the US was targeted by the highest percentage of DDoS attacks traffic — over 10% of all attack packets and almost 8% of all attack bytes. Following the US is China, Canada, and Singapore.
Network-layer DDoS attacks by ingress country
When trying to understand where network-layer DDoS attacks originate, we cannot use the same method as we use for the application-layer attack analysis. To launch an application-layer DDoS attack, successful handshakes must occur between the client and the server in order to establish an HTTP/S connection. For a successful handshake to occur, the attacker cannot spoof their source IP address. While the attacker may use botnets, proxies, and other methods to obfuscate their identity, the attacking client’s source IP location does sufficiently represent the attack source of application-layer DDoS attacks.
On the other hand, to launch network-layer DDoS attacks, in most cases, no handshake is needed. Attackers can spoof the source IP address in order to obfuscate the attack source and introduce randomness into the attack properties, which can make it harder for simple DDoS protection systems to block the attack. So if we were to derive the source country based on a spoofed source IP, we would get a ‘spoofed country’.
For this reason, when analyzing network-layer DDoS attack sources, we bucket the traffic by the Cloudflare edge data center locations where the traffic was ingested, and not by the (potentially) spoofed source IP to get an understanding of where the attacks originate from. We are able to achieve geographical accuracy in our report because we have data centers in over 270 cities around the world. However, even this method is not 100% accurate, as traffic may be back hauled and routed via various Internet Service Providers and countries for reasons that vary from cost reduction to congestion and failure management.
In Q1, the percentage of attacks detected in Cloudflare’s data centers in Azerbaijan increased by 16,624% QoQ and 96,900% YoY, making it the country with the highest percentage of network-layer DDoS activity (48.5%).
Following our Azerbaijanian data center is our Palestinian data center where a staggering 41.9% of all traffic was DDoS traffic. This represents a 10,120% increase QoQ and 46,456% YoY.
To view all regions and countries, check out the interactive map.
Attack vectors
SYN Floods remain the most popular DDoS attack vector, while use of generic UDP floods drops significantly in Q1.
An attack vector is a term used to describe the method that the attacker uses to launch their DDoS attack, i.e., the IP protocol, packet attributes such as TCP flags, flooding method, and other criteria.
In Q1, SYN floods accounted for 57% of all network-layer DDoS attacks, representing a 69% increase QoQ and a 13% increase YoY. In second place, attacks over SSDP surged by over 1,100% QoQ. Following were RST floods and attacks over UDP. Last quarter, generic UDP floods took the second place, but this time, generic UDP DDoS attacks plummeted by 87% QoQ from 32% to a mere 3.9%.
Emerging threats
Identifying the top attack vectors helps organizations understand the threat landscape. In turn, this may help them improve their security posture to protect against those threats. Similarly, learning about new emerging threats that may not yet account for a significant portion of attacks, can help mitigate them before they become a significant force.
When we look at new emerging attack vectors in Q1, we can see increases in DDoS attacks reflecting off of Lantronix services (+971% QoQ) and SSDP reflection attacks (+724% QoQ). Additionally, SYN-ACK attacks increased by 437% and attacks by Mirai botnets by 321% QoQ.
Attacker reflecting traffic off of Lantronix Discovery Service
Lantronix is a US-based software and hardware company that provides solutions for Internet of Things (IoT) management amongst their vast offering. One of the tools that they provide to manage their IoT components is the Lantronix Discovery Protocol. It is a command-line tool that helps to search and find Lantronix devices. The discovery tool is UDP-based, meaning that no handshake is required. The source IP can be spoofed. So an attacker can use the tool to search for publicly exposed Lantronix devices using a 4 byte request, which will then in turn respond with a 30 byte response from port 30718. By spoofing the source IP of the victim, all Lantronix devices will target their responses to the victim — resulting in a reflection/amplification attack.
Simple Service Discovery Protocol used for reflection DDoS attacks
The Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) protocol works similarly to the Lantronix Discovery protocol, but for Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) devices such as network-connected printers. By abusing the SSDP protocol, attackers can generate a reflection-based DDoS attack overwhelming the target’s infrastructure and taking their Internet properties offline. You can read more about SSDP-based DDoS attacks here.
Network-layer DDoS attacks by attack rate
In Q1, we observed a massive uptick in volumetric DDoS attacks — both from the packet rate and bitrate perspective. Attacks over 10 Mpps grew by over 300% QoQ, and attacks over 100 Gbps grew by 645% QoQ.
There are different ways of measuring the size of an L3/4 DDoS attack. One is the volume of traffic it delivers, measured as the bit rate (specifically, terabits per second or gigabits per second). Another is the number of packets it delivers, measured as the packet rate (specifically, millions of packets per second).
Attacks with high bit rates attempt to cause a denial-of-service event by clogging the Internet link, while attacks with high packet rates attempt to overwhelm the servers, routers, or other in-line hardware appliances. These devices dedicate a certain amount of memory and computation power to process each packet. Therefore, by bombarding it with many packets, the appliance can be left with no further processing resources. In such a case, packets are “dropped,” i.e., the appliance is unable to process them. For users, this results in service disruptions and denial of service.
Distribution by packet rate
The majority of network-layer DDoS attacks remain below 50,000 packets per second. While 50 kpps is on the lower side of the spectrum at Cloudflare scale, it can still easily take down unprotected Internet properties and congest even a standard Gigabit Ethernet connection.
When we look at the changes in the attack sizes, we can see that attacks of over 10 Mpps grew by over 300% QoQ. Similarly, attacks of 1-10 Mpps grew by almost 40% QoQ.
Distribution by bitrate
In Q1, most of the network-layer DDoS attacks remain below 500 Mbps. This too is a tiny drop in the water at Cloudflare scale, but can very quickly shut down unprotected Internet properties with less capacity or at the very least congest, even a standard Gigabit Ethernet connection.
Graph of the distribution of network-layer DDoS attacks by bit rate in 2022 Q1
Similarly to the trends observed in the packet-per-second realm, here we can also see large increases. The amount of DDoS attacks that peaked over 100 Gbps increased by 645% QoQ; attacks peaking between 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps increased by 407%; attacks peaking between 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps increased by 88%; and even attacks peaking between 500 Mbps to 1 Gbps increased by almost 20% QoQ.
Network-layer DDoS attacks by duration
Most attacks remain under one hour in duration, reiterating the need for automated always-on DDoS mitigation solutions.
We measure the duration of an attack by recording the difference between when it is first detected by our systems as an attack and the last packet we see with that attack signature towards that specific target.
In previous reports, we provided a breakdown of ‘attacks under an hour’, and larger time ranges. However, in most cases over 90 percent of attacks last less than an hour. So starting from this report, we broke down the short attacks and grouped them by shorter time ranges to provide better granularity.
One important thing to keep in mind is that even if an attack lasts only a few minutes, if it is successful, the repercussions could last well beyond the initial attack duration. IT personnel responding to a successful attack may spend hours and even days restoring their services.
In the first quarter of 2022, more than half of the attacks lasted 10-20 minutes, approximately 40% ended within 10 minutes, another ~5% lasted 20-40 minutes, and the remaining lasted longer than 40 minutes.
Short attacks can easily go undetected, especially burst attacks that, within seconds, bombard a target with a significant number of packets, bytes, or requests. In this case, DDoS protection services that rely on manual mitigation by security analysis have no chance in mitigating the attack in time. They can only learn from it in their post-attack analysis, then deploy a new rule that filters the attack fingerprint and hope to catch it next time. Similarly, using an “on-demand” service, where the security team will redirect traffic to a DDoS provider during the attack, is also inefficient because the attack will already be over before the traffic routes to the on-demand DDoS provider.
It’s recommended that companies use automated, always-on DDoS protection services that analyze traffic and apply real-time fingerprinting fast enough to block short-lived attacks.
Summary
Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. A better Internet is one that is more secure, faster, and reliable for everyone — even in the face of DDoS attacks. As part of our mission, since 2017, we’ve been providing unmetered and unlimited DDoS protection for free to all of our customers. Over the years, it has become increasingly easier for attackers to launch DDoS attacks. But as easy as it has become, we want to make sure that it is even easier — and free — for organizations of all sizes to protect themselves against DDoS attacks of all types.
Not using Cloudflare yet? Start now with our Free and Pro plans to protect your websites, or contact us for comprehensive DDoS protection for your entire network using Magic Transit.
Following Russia’s unjustified and tragic invasion of Ukraine in late February, the world has watched closely as Russian troops attempted to advance across Ukraine, only to be resisted and repelled by the Ukrainian people. Similarly, we’ve seen a significant amount of cyber attack activity in the region. We continue to work to protect an increasing number of Ukrainian government, media, financial, and nonprofit websites, and we protected the Ukrainian top level domain (.ua) to help keep Ukraine’s presence on the Internet operational.
At the same time, we’ve closely watched significant and unprecedented activity on the Internet in Russia. The Russian government has taken steps to tighten its control over both the technical components and the content of the Russian Internet. For their part, the people in Russia are doing something very different. They have been adopting tools to maintain access to the global Internet, and they have been seeking out non-Russian media sources. This blog post outlines what we’ve observed.
The Russian Government asserts control over the Internet
Over the last five years, the Russian government has taken steps to tighten its control of a sovereign Internet within Russia’s borders, including laws requiring Russian ISPs to install equipment allowing the government to monitor and block Internet activity, and requiring the establishment of an exclusively Russian DNS (outside ICANN). And it created mechanisms for the Russian government to control how Russia was connected to the global Internet, so they could pull the plug if they wanted.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government has made a series of announcements related to implementation of its sovereign Internet laws. Russian government agencies were instructed to switch to Russian DNS servers, move public resources to Russian hosting services, and take a number of other steps designed to reduce reliance on non-Russian providers. Although some took these initiatives as an announcement that Russia intended to disconnect from the global Internet, so far Russia does not appear to have leveraged the tools it has to disconnect itself entirely from the global Internet. We continue to see connections processing successfully in Russia through non-Russia infrastructure.
In the meantime, authorities in Russia have implemented a series of targeted blocking actions against websites and operators that they find objectionable. Initially, officials targeted popular social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as Russian language outlets based outside of the country.
We can see the effect of some of those blocks on traffic from Russian users to different news websites in Russia and Ukraine before and after blocks were implemented.
In each case, these news sites saw exponential growth in their traffic in the days around the February 24th invasion of Ukraine. But that increase was met within a matter of days by actions to block traffic to those sites. The blocks had varying degrees of success over the first few weeks, though each of them seem to have been eventually successful in denying access to those sources of news through traditional Internet channels.
But that is only half the story. As the Russian government took steps to control traditional channels for Internet access, there were shifts in the ways many Russians used the Internet.
Russian citizens turning to tools to gain access to the open Internet
Russians have been adopting applications and tools that allow them to engage with the Internet privately and avoid some of the mechanisms that the Russian government is using to control and monitor access to the Internet. Whereas the most popular applications in the Apple App Store in most of the world in March continue to relate to social media and games, the leaderboard in Russia looked very different:
All of the top apps in Russia in March were for private and secure Internet access or encrypted messaging apps, including the most downloaded app – Cloudflare’s own WARP / 1.1.1.1 (a privacy-based recursive DNS resolver). This list of popular apps is a stunning contrast with every other country in the world.
Because of the significant and important popularity of WARP (1.1.1.1), we’ve had some detailed insight into exactly how this has played out. If we look back to the beginning of February we see that Cloudflare’s WARP tool was little used in Russia. Its use took off from the first weekend of the war, and peaked two weeks ago. Later, after this virtual migration to such secure tools became apparent, we saw attempts to block access to the tools used to access the Internet securely.
While levels have receded from their peak, a large number of Russians continue to use Cloudflare WARP in Russia at massively higher levels than pre-war.
In addition to the ways Russians are using the Internet increasingly relying on private and encrypted communications, we’ve also seen a shift in what they are trying to access. Here’s a chart of DNS requests from Russian users for a well known US newspaper. Recent DNS traffic for the site has quintupled compared to pre-war levels, indicating Russians are trying to access that news source.
And here’s DNS traffic for a large French news source. Again, DNS lookups have grown enormously as Russians try to access it.
And here’s a British newspaper.
The picture is clear from these three charts. Russians want access to non-Russian news sources and based on the popularity of private Internet access tools and VPNs, they are willing to work to get it.
A front line against cyberattack
In addition to the services we’ve been able to provide average citizens in Russia, our servers at the edge of the Internet in-country have also permitted us to detect and block attacks originating there. When attacks are mitigated inside Russia, they never travel outside Russian borders. That’s always been part of the proposition of Cloudflare’s distributed network – to identify and block cyber attacks (especially DDoS attacks) locally and before they can ever get off the ground.
Here’s what DDoS activity originating inside Russia and blocked there by Cloudflare has looked like since the beginning of February. Normal DDoS activity originating from Russian networks and blocked by Cloudflare’s servers there is relatively low throughout February but then grows massively in the middle of March.
To be clear, being able to identify where cyber attack traffic originates is not the same as being able to attribute where the attacker is located. Attributing cyber attacks is difficult, and now is a time to be particularly careful with attribution. It is relatively common for cyber attackers to launch attacks from remote locations around the world. This often happens when they are able to hijack devices in other countries through things like IoT (Internet of Things) corruptions.
But even with such subterfuge, we’ve still seen a significant increase in the number of blocked attacks that are hitting our servers inside Russia.
A few weeks ago, as the invasion of Ukraine was in its early stages, I noted that “Russia needs more Internet, not less.” At a time of unprecedented economic sanctions by the United States and Europe, there have been calls for all foreign companies to go further and exit Russia completely, including calls for Internet providers to disconnect Russia. To be clear, Cloudflare has minimal sales and commercial activity in Russia – we’ve never had a corporate entity, an office, or employees there – and we’ve taken steps to ensure that we’re not paying taxes or fees to the Russian government. But given the significant impact of our services on the availability and security of the Internet, we believe removing our services from Russia altogether would do more harm than good.
While we deeply appreciate the motivation of the calls for companies to exit Russia, this withdrawal by Internet companies can have the unintended effect of advancing and entrenching the interests of the Russian government to control the Internet in Russia. Efforts to have Russia cut off from the global Internet through ICANN and RIPE will only cut off the Russian people from information about the war in Ukraine that the Russian government doesn’t want them to access. After a number of U.S.-based certificate authorities stopped issuing SSL certificates for Russian websites, Russia responded in early March by encouraging Russian citizens to download a Russian Root Certificate Authority instead. As observed by EFF, “the Russian state’s stopgap measure to keep its services running also enables spying on Russians, now and in the future.”
This is why there has been near universal agreement by experts that it is imperative the Russian Internet stay as open as possible for the Russian people. Dozens of civil society groups have urged governments to work to counteract authoritarian actions “and ensure that sanctions and other steps meant to repudiate the Russian government’s illegal actions do not backfire, by reinforcing Putin’s efforts to assert information control.” Russian digital rights activists have pleaded with service providers to offer Russians free VPN access so they are not left isolated from global news sources. Even the U.S. State Department has made clear, “It is critical to maintain the flow of information to the people of Russia to the fullest extent possible.”
Supporting our mission to help build a better Internet, it’s been a busy six weeks for our team monitoring these developments and working around the clock to make sure Ukrainian web properties are defended and that ordinary Russians can access the global Internet. We remain in awe of the brave Ukrainians standing up in defense of their homeland, and continue to hope that peace will prevail.
The Conti ransomware gang runs like any number of businesses around the world. It has multiple departments, from HR and administrators to coders and researchers. It has policies on how its hackers should process their code, and shares best practices to keep the group’s members hidden from law enforcement.
It has been interesting to notice how unimportant and ineffective cyber operations have been in the Russia-Ukraine war. Russia launched a wiper against Ukraine at the beginning, but it was foundandneutered. Near as I can tell, the only thing that worked was the disabling of regional KA-SAT SATCOM terminals.
It’s probably too early to reach any conclusions, but people are starting to writeabout this, with varying theories.
I want to write about this, too, but I’m waiting for things to progress more.
At Cloudflare, we’ve watched in horror the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As the possibility of war looked more likely, we began to carefully monitor the situation on the ground, with the goal of keeping our employees, our customers, and our network safe.
Helping protect Ukraine against cyberattacks
Attacks against the Internet in Ukraine began even before the start of the invasion. Those attacks—and the steady stream of DDoS attacks we’ve seen in the days since—prompted us to extend our services to Ukrainian government and telecom organizations at no cost in order to ensure they can continue to operate and deliver critical information to their citizens as well as to the rest of the world about what is happening to them.
Going beyond that, under Project Galileo, we are expediting onboarding of any Ukrainian entities for our full suite of protections. We are currently assisting more than sixty organizations in Ukraine and the region—with about 25% of those organizations coming aboard during the current crisis. Many of the new organizations are groups coming together to assist refugees, share vital information, or members of the Ukrainian diaspora in nearby countries looking to organize and help. Any Ukrainian organizations that are facing attack can apply for free protection under Project Galileo by visiting www.cloudflare.com/galileo, and we will expedite their review and approval.
Securing our customers’ data during the conflict
In order to preserve the integrity of customer data, we moved customer encryption key material out of our data centers in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. Our services continued to operate in the regions using our Keyless SSL technology, which allows encryption sessions to be terminated in a secure data center away from where there may be a risk of compromise.
If any of our facilities or servers in Ukraine, Belarus, or Russia lose power or connectivity to the Internet, we have configured them to brick themselves. All data on disk is encrypted with keys that are not stored on site. Bricked machines will not be able to be booted unless a secure, machine-specific key that is not stored on site is entered.
Monitoring Internet availability in Ukraine
Our team continues to monitor Internet patterns across Ukraine. While usage across the country has declined over the last 10 days, we are thankful that in most locations the Internet is still accessible.
We are taking steps to ensure that, as long as there is connectivity out of the country, our services will continue to operate.
Staying ahead of the threat globally
Cyber threats to Ukrainian customers and telecoms is only part of the broader story of potential cyberattacks. Governments around the world have emphasized that organizations must be prepared to respond to disruptive cyber activity. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), for example, has recommended that all organizations—large and small—go “Shields Up” to protect themselves from attack. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has encouraged organizations to improve their cyber resilience.
This is where careful monitoring of the attacks in Ukraine is so important. It doesn’t just help our customers in Ukraine — it helps us learn and improve our products so that we can protect all of our customers globally. When wiper malware was identified in Ukraine, for example, we adapted our Zero Trust products to make sure our customers were protected.
We’ve long believed that everyone should have access to cybersecurity tools to protect themselves, regardless of their size or resources. But during this time of heightened threat, access to cybersecurity services is particularly critical. We have a number of free services available to protect you online — and we encourage you to take advantage of them.
Providing services in Russia
Since the invasion, providing any services in Russia is understandably fraught. Governments have been united in imposing a stream of new sanctions and there have even been some calls to disconnect Russia from the global Internet. As discussed by ICANN, the Internet Society, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Techdirt, among others, the consequences of such a shutdown would be profound.
The scope of new sanctions issued in the last few weeks have been unprecedented in their reach, frequency, and the number of different governments involved. Governments have issued sweeping new sanctions designed to impose severe costs against those who supported the invasion of Ukraine, including government entities and officials in Russia and Belarus. Sanctions have been imposed against Russia’s top financial institutions, including Russia’s two largest banks, fundamentally altering the ability of Russians to access capital. The entire break away territories of Donetsk and Luhansk, including all of the residents of those regions, are subject to comprehensive sanctions. We’ve seen sanctions on state-owned enterprises, elite Russian families, and the leaders of intelligence-directed disinformation outlets.
These sanctions are intended to make sure that those who supported the invasion are held to account. And Cloudflare has taken action to comply. Over the past several years, Cloudflare has developed a robust and comprehensive sanctions compliance program that allows us to track and take immediate steps to comply with new sanctions regulations as they are implemented. In addition to an internal compliance team and outside counsel, we employ third party tools to flag potential matches or partial ownership by sanctioned parties, and we review reports from third-parties about potential connections. We have also worked with government experts inside and outside of the United States to identify when there is a connection between a sanctioned entity and a Cloudflare account.
Over the past week, our team has ensured that we are complying with these new sanctions as they are announced. We have closed off paid access to our network and systems in the new comprehensively-sanctioned regions. And we have terminated any customers we have identified as tied to sanctions, including those related to Russian financial institutions, Russian influence campaigns, and the Russian-affiliated Donetsk and Luhansk governments. We expect additional sanctions are likely to come from governments as they determine additional steps are appropriate, and we will continue to move quickly to comply with those requirements as they are announced.
Beyond this, we have received several calls to terminate all of Cloudflare’s services inside Russia. We have carefully considered these requests and discussed them with government and civil society experts. Our conclusion, in consultation with those experts, is that Russia needs more Internet access, not less.
As the conflict has continued, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in requests from Russian networks to worldwide media, reflecting a desire by ordinary Russian citizens to see world news beyond that provided within Russia.
We’ve also seen an increase in Russian blocking and throttling efforts, combined with Russian efforts to control the content of the media operating inside Russia with a new “fake news” law.
The Russian government itself, over the last several years, has threatened repeatedly to block certain Cloudflare services and customers. Indiscriminately terminating service would do little to harm the Russian government, but would both limit access to information outside the country, and make significantly more vulnerable those who have used us to shield themselves as they have criticized the government.
In fact, we believe the Russian government would celebrate us shutting down Cloudflare’s services in Russia. We absolutely appreciate the spirit of many Ukrainians making requests across the tech sector for companies to terminate services in Russia. However, when what Cloudflare is fundamentally providing is a more open, private, and secure Internet, we believe that shutting down Cloudflare’s services entirely in Russia would be a mistake.
Our thoughts are with the people of Ukraine and the entire team at Cloudflare prays for a peaceful resolution as soon as possible.
Cloudflare operates in more than 250 cities worldwide where we connect our equipment to the Internet to provide our broad range of services. We have data centers in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia and across the world. To operate our service we monitor traffic trends, performance and errors seen at each data center, aggregate data about DNS, and congestion and packet loss on Internet links.
Internet Traffic
For reference, here is a map of Ukraine showing its major cities. Note that whenever we talk about dates and times in this post, we are using UTC. Ukraine’s current time zone is UTC+2.
Internet traffic in Ukraine generally follows a pretty predictable pattern based on day and night. Lowest in the hours after local midnight and picking up as people wake up. It’s not uncommon to see a dip around lunchtime and a peak when people go home in the evening. That pattern is clearly visible in this chart of overall Internet traffic seen by Cloudflare for Ukrainian networks on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday prior to the invasion.
Starting Thursday, traffic was significantly lower. On Thursday, we saw about 70% of our normal request volume and about 60% on Friday. Request volumes recovered to 70% of pre-invasion volume on Saturday and Sunday before peaking on Monday and Tuesday because of attacks that we mitigated coming from networks in Ukraine.
This chart shows attack traffic blocked by Cloudflare that originated on networks in Ukraine. Note that this is quite different from attacks against .ua domains, which can originate anywhere in the world and are discussed below.
Analysis of network traffic from different cities in Ukraine gives us some insight into people’s use of the Internet and availability of Internet access. Here’s Internet traffic from the capital, Kyiv:
Once again the “normal” ebb and flow of Internet traffic is seen on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Early on Thursday morning, Internet traffic picks up after Vladimir Putin’s announcement of the attack but never reaches normal levels that day. Friday is even lower, but traffic in Kyiv has gradually increased since then.
Moving westward to Lviv, we see a very different pattern of use.
The same normal flows on Monday to Wednesday are visible, followed by a smaller drop for three days and then a dramatic increase in traffic. As many Ukrainians have moved westward towards Poland, Slovakia and Romania, away from the fighting, it appears that Internet traffic has grown with their arrival in Lviv.
The city of Uzhhorod on the Slovakian border shows a similar pattern.
To the east of Lviv, the city of Ternopil has also seen an increase in Internet traffic.
As has Rivne.
Looking at Rivne, Ternopil, Uzhhorod, and Lviv, it’s possible that the peaks in Internet traffic on different days show the movement of people westward as they try to escape fighting around the capital and in the east and south.
On the opposite side of Ukraine, the situation is quite different. Here’s the traffic pattern for the city of Kharkiv. It has stayed at roughly between 50% and 60% (March 3) of the usual rate since the beginning of the invasion.
North of Kharkiv, the city of Sumy (north-eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border), traffic levels are very low since yesterday, March 3, 2022.
A similar trend can be seen in the city Izyum, south of Kharkiv (east of Ukraine), where traffic is very low since March 2.
Traffic in Donetsk has remained fairly consistent throughout the invasion, except for March 1 when there was a dramatic change in traffic. This was most likely caused by an attack against a single .ua domain name, with the attack traffic coming, at least in part, from Donetsk.
Some other areas with fighting have experienced the largest drops and partial Internet outages. Moving to the south, traffic in Mariupol declined after the invasion and has dropped dramatically in the last three days with outages on local networks.
Here’s a view of traffic from AS43554 in Mariupol showing what seems to be a total outage on March 1 that continued through March 4.
To the west of Mariupol, Osypenko shows a gradual decline in traffic followed by three days of minimal Internet use.
Similar large drops are seen in Irpin (just outside Kyiv to the northwest).
And in Bucha, which is next to Irpin; both Bucha and Irpin are close to Hostomel airport.
There has also been minimal traffic (or possible outage) from Severodonetsk (north of Luhansk) for the past four of days.
We have started to see traffic from Starlink terminals in Ukraine, although traffic levels remain very low.
Cyberattacks
The physical world invasion has been accompanied by an increase in cyberattacks against Ukrainian domain names and networks.
Just prior to the invasion, on February 23, Cloudflare’s automated systems detected a large amount of packet loss on a major Internet connection to our Kyiv data center and automatically mitigated the problem by routing traffic onto other networks. This packet loss was caused by congestion on the transit provider’s network, which in turn was caused by a large DDoS attack. It appeared in our dashboards as packet loss over a 30-minute period between 1500-1530 (the different colors are different parts of our network infrastructure in Kyiv).
This next chart gives an overview of traffic to .ua domains protected by Cloudflare and requests that are “mitigated” (i.e. blocked by our firewall products). The chart shows only layer 7 traffic and does not give information about layer 3/4 DDoS, which is covered separately below.
On the first day of the invasion attacks against .ua domains were prevalent and at times responsible for almost 50% of the requests being sent to those domains. From Friday, February 25 attacks returned to levels seen prior to the invasion and started picking up again on Tuesday, March 1.
Digging into the layer 7 mitigations we can see that the biggest attacks over all are layer 7 DDoS attacks.
The next largest attacks are being mitigated by firewall rules put in place by customers.
Followed by blocking requests based on our IP threat reputation database.
Layer 3/4 traffic is harder to attribute to a specific domain or target as IP addresses are shared across different customers. Looking at network-level DDoS traffic hitting our Kyiv data center, we see occasional peaks of DDoS traffic reaching a high of nearly 1.8 Gbps.
Note that although the layer 3/4 and layer 7 attacks we are mitigating have been relatively small, that does not mean they are not devastating or problematic. A small website or service can be taken down by relatively small attacks, and the layer 7 attack traffic often includes vulnerability scanning, credential stuffing, SQL injection, and the usual panoply of techniques carried out to either deface or penetrate an Internet service.
Unprotected Internet properties are vulnerable to even small attacks and need protection.
Social media and communications
Much of the imagery and information coming out of Ukraine is being shared on social networks. Looking at social networks in Ukraine via DNS data shows that Facebook use has increased.
As has Instagram.
However, TikTok seems to have lost traffic initially, but it has started to return (although not to its pre-conflict levels) in the last two days.
Twitter usage increased and has remained higher than levels seen before the invasion.
Turning to messaging apps, we can compare Messenger, Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp. WhatsApp traffic appears to have declined inline with the broad change in Internet traffic across Ukraine.
Telegram stayed largely unchanged until early this week, when we observed a small increase in use.
Messenger shows a similar pattern.
But the largest change has been traffic to the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal, which has seen dramatic growth since the invasion began. We are seeing 8x to 10x the DNS volume for Signal as compared to the days before the start of the conflict.
Tarah Wheeler and Josephine Wolff analyze a recent court decision that the NotPetya attacks are not considered an act of war under the wording of Merck’s insurance policy, and that the insurers must pay the $1B+ claim. Wheeler and Wolff argue that the judge “did the right thing for the wrong reasons..”
Interesting story about a barcode scanner app that has been pushing malware on to Android phones. The app is called Barcode Scanner. It’s been around since 2017 and is owned by the Ukrainian company Lavabird Ldt. But a December 2020 update included some new features:
However, a rash of malicious activity was recently traced back to the app. Users began noticing something weird going on with their phones: their default browsers kept getting hijacked and redirected to random advertisements, seemingly out of nowhere.
Generally, when this sort of thing happens it’s because the app was recently sold. That’s not the case here.
It is frightening that with one update an app can turn malicious while going under the radar of Google Play Protect. It is baffling to me that an app developer with a popular app would turn it into malware. Was this the scheme all along, to have an app lie dormant, waiting to strike after it reaches popularity? I guess we will never know.
The collective thoughts of the interwebz
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