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DDoS attacks surge 238% in Mena in Q3

Hackers bombard banks and payment providers

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the Middle East and Africa (Mena) region surged by 238 per cent year-over-year in Q3 2024, a recent study showed.

According to cybersecurity provider StormWall, the financial sector was the hardest hit. Strikingly, attacks on banks and cloud payment providers grew by 284 per cent compared to Q3 2023.

A DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of internet traffic.

StormWall’s latest report shows that most attacks were concentrated in finance (42 per cent), entertainment (21 per cent), and government (10 per cent). Defenders faced a dual threat from profit-driven criminals pursuing extortion and hacktivists advancing political agendas.

A notable development in Q3 was the scale of botnets operating in the Mena region. Botnets averaged 28,000 devices during the quarter — four times more than in the same period last year. This growth enables attackers to escalate the volume of operations. The largest recorded attack reached 1.5 Tbps and targeted a UAE-based bank.

Hyper-volumetric network-layer DDoS attacks surged by 400 per cent compared to the previous quarter, evolving from rare occurrences into frequent threats. Once limited to state-sponsored actors, these capabilities have become more widely accessible. Even less sophisticated, profit-driven hackers now wield cutting-edge DDoS tools.

Looking at the breakdown by country, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel were the most targeted (31 per cent, 16 per cent, and 14 per cent of attacks respectively). The UAE in particular saw its share of attacks increase from 27 per cent in the previous quarter, as the share of for-profit attacks increased compared to hactivists and focus shifted to attacks targeting the region’s economic hubs.

Meanwhile, attacks on government services were predominantly localized to Israel and Palestine. Notably, 60 per cent of these attacks targeted news and media outlets, while 30 per cent were directed at the financial and fintech sectors.