“The surge can be attributed in part to digitalisation, the war in Ukraine, and a long-tail of new vulnerabilities and exposed services driven by work-from-home remote access during Covid."

Radware’s threat intelligence team has released a threat advisory about the Passion Botnet, a DDoS-as-a-Service the Passion Group is offering to pro-Russian hacktivists.

The first six months of 2022 were marked by a significant increase in DDoS activity across the globe, according to a new report.

The cybersecurity threat landscape in the first quarter of 2022 represented a mixed bag of old enemies and new foes. New actors dominated the DDoS threat landscape while application security faced tried-and-true attack vectors.

"Bad actors are getting smarter, more organised, and more targeted in pursuing their objectives whether that be for money, fame, or a political cause."

Cybercrime flourished in 2021, and there are no signs that it will slow down in 2022. There are several factors behind this high-confidence prediction.

Radware’s director of threat intelligence, Pascal Geenens, says in the first nine months of 2021 there were more blocked attacks than there were in the entirety of 2020.

"The window between the disclosing and weaponising of new vulnerabilities is getting very slim."

Internet of Things (IoT) search engines present both good solutions and serious risks of weaponised exploits.

"This is the first time we are seeing the bad actors selectively target organisations and favour those with unprotected assets for their ransom letters."

The DDoS attack report analyses attack activity by industries, attack vectors, DDoS attacks on applications and on-premise versus cloud.

By the end of 2020, the extortionists started circling back to earlier victims who did not pay ransom in earlier attempts, reusing their attack research.

There are pressures to stay trading, but it is imperative to ensure that actions taken now don’t encourage security disasters in the future.

Taking measures to prevent disruption to critical servers is paramount, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are high on the list of threats.