FS-ISAC and the cloud company Akamai recently published a joint report, The Evolution of DDoS: Return of the Hacktivists, to educate industry on the somewhat renewed increase of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, the business risks it poses, and best practices on mitigation to better combat these incidents.

In 2022 there was a 22 percent increase in the volume of DDoS attacks targeting financial firms. A good amount of the increase in DDoS attacks are driven by hacktivist groups that have taken sides in the Russia-Ukraine war or other geopolitical conflicts, according to the report. This includes organizations such as Killnet, which has targeted the U.S. and countries throughout Europe. In addition, the report found that many DDoS campaigns now include extortion tactics and as more services migrate to the cloud, service disruptions anywhere in the supply chain could lead to serious impacts to an organization's operations. Lastly, DDoS can serve as a cover for other, potentially more damaging cyber activities such as infiltration of systems and exfiltration of data and delivery of malware. This means that when network defenders encounter DDoS, they must also be on the alert for other types of malicious activity. Access the full report below.