Cyber Defense eMagazine February Edition for 2023

etween governments and operators will bear little to no fruit in the prevention of successful DDoS
attacks. In fact, it will encourage attackers to continue.
Prediction 2: DDoS will become the weapon of choice for cyber-warfare.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict taught us that attackers don’t need expensive and sophisticated anti-satellite
weapon systems to cause chaos: In February, Russia launched a massive cyberattack against Viasat’s
KA-SAT satellite internet network and took thousands of modems offline. According to a statement issued
by the EU council, the attack “had a significant impact causing indiscriminate communication outages
and disruptions across several public authorities, businesses, and users in Ukraine, as well as affecting
several EU Member States.” DDoS attacks will turn into the weapon of mass disruption, and we’ll see
more nation-state DDoS attacks unleashed – and probably more cyber carnage.
Prediction 3: Layer players: multi-vector attacks will rise and be more automated.
The DDoS vulnerability gap which exists in most organizations is huge. Automated sequences and
switching attack vectors will become more frequent and sophisticated, it’s easy to implement and will
increase an attacker's chances by 50% to 99% of succeeding in most cases. According to a quarterly
study conducted by Lumen, in Q3 2022 alone, multi-vector attacks represented 40% of all DDoS attacks.
As the dynamic DDoS attack surface keeps expanding, we’ll see more advanced attacks in relatively
lower volumes and shorter frequencies that can easily bypass all layers of DDoS protections and inflict
even more damage than traditional volumetric single-dimension attacks.
Prediction 4: Extortion will rise. It’s pure economics and the incentive is too great.
With DDoS-as-a-Service becoming so common and the attacks easily succeeding, combined with
damages running into the billions of dollars, organizations, and insurance companies paying reasonable
extortion demands; it’s likely many attackers already understand this. It’s hard to measure, as most
companies being hit with a ransom DDoS attack do not report it. According to Cloudflare, 15% of their
customers in Q3 2022 received a ransom note from attackers to stop the DDoS assault. This represents
a 67% increase from 2021-2022 and will most likely continue to grow. Let's face it, if an attacker can drop
a stock exchange, he or she can request a small fee for not doing so for days. Most CISOs, CEOs, and
boards may pay a nominal fee.
Prediction 5: Growing damages will increase demand for accountability and action.
With more successful DDoS attacks wreaking havoc in organizations’ uptime, and damages impacting
business’ bottom line, CISOs will seek a better understanding of their security investment and its impact.
Furthermore, CISO’s and boards will demand more assurances for DDoS protection contracts purchased,
as well as visibility into their DDoS resilience. Organizations will start to identify vulnerabilities and push
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