Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the cloud company that powers and protects life online, released a new State of the Internet report that spotlights the most interesting security stories of the year according to Akamai’s Security Intelligence Group. A Year in Review: A Look at 2023’s Cyber Trends and What's to Come finds that the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region was the most targeted by Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks in particular. Unless the geopolitical situation changes, it is expected that EMEA will continue to be caught in the crosshairs of DDoS attack events. This will continue to cause disruption to businesses in the region and cost them both time and money.
According to the report, threat actors have been successful with not only DDoS attacks but also with web and bot attacks in the region. As such, these three vectors are very likely to continue to be the preferred avenues of attack. Moreover, these vectors have been steadily evolving to maintain, and even gather, strength. Web application zero-day exploits are being intertwined with ransomware techniques (by ransomware groups such as CL0P) and are including DDoS attacks to create a triple extortion tactic. Web scalping via bots has become the new normal for almost every major airline event or ticket sale.
The report also finds that in EMEA:
- Half (50.1%) of all malicious bot activity targeted commerce, followed by other digital media at 15.3%, and video media at 12.2% in the period January 2022 - October 2023.
- Commerce remains the top vertical for web application and API attacks, with attacks now topping 6.5 billion (up from 4.6 billion, a 41% increase since Akamai’s March 2023 report).
- Although manufacturing has moved up from fourth to replace financial services in the third position, attacks against financial services have climbed 70% since reported in June 2023, reaching 1.7 billion up from 1 billion.
“The fact that EMEA has displaced the United States as the top region for cyberattacks in a number of different verticals and categories of attack types, most notably DDoS, is not hugely surprising since many aggressors are nation-states or nation-state sympathizers,” said Richard Meeus, Director of Security Technology and Strategy at Akamai. “Businesses should increase the effectiveness of their efforts to protect themselves by following best practices for cyber and operational alignment while also proactively working on their backup plans. This way they can get ahead of the curve and protect themselves in 2024.”
