Telecoms was the most targeted sector for DDoS attacks in 2023

Zayo’s annual Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Insights Report found a significant increase in the intensity of DDoS attacks last year. ‘Unprotected organisations’ shelled out an average of £4,700 per minute of each attack, totalling a £325,000 average cost to businesses.

A key driver to this cost was the steep rise in the duration of DDoS attacks throughout the year, which apparently jumped by more than 400% from Q1 to Q4.

Telcos experienced the most frequent cyber-grief, comprising about 40% of total attack volume with nearly 13,000 attacks in the second half of the year, followed by retail, healthcare, government and educational institutions.

Apparently the number of DDoS attacks in the first half of 2023 was up 200% from all of 2022. While that seemed to contract in the second half of the year, that didn’t really seem to signal much good news as volumetric attacks were replaced by multi-vector attacks, which cause more widespread damage by targeting individual IP addresses, email systems, databases or web browsers. These are much harder to detect, we’re told.

"What we’re seeing is that cybercrime is only getting savvier,” said Anna Claiborne, Senior VP of Network Connectivity at Zayo. “AI is presenting itself as a double-edged sword in this space. On one side of the blade, criminals are using AI to increase the sophistication of attacks and circumvent traditional defence mechanisms; on the other, mitigation platforms are using AI to dynamically identify and defend against new and emerging threats. As DDoS remains a profitable model for cybercriminals, attacks will continue to be a brutal inevitability for businesses. But luckily, DDoS protection is also rising to the occasion."

Eric O’Neill, National Security Strategist at Carbon Black added: “Most people on the internet aren’t plotting a DDoS attack, but the internet is a big place and Dark Web crime is the fastest growing business on earth. We’re in an attacker’s market and they are leveraging sophisticated technologies and cutting-edge techniques to innovate the way they deceive, disrupt and destroy our most critical data. To stop the attackers from gaining the upper hand, we need DDoS protection that is as easy and effective as turning on a switch.”

This report analysed about 103,000 threat detections and mitigations experienced by Zayo customers in 2023 across 14 industries and regions in North America and Western Europe. Here’s some infographics from the report: