Telecom Carriers Becoming More Frequent Targets of DDoS Attacks: Report

Telecom carriers are increasingly being targeted with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, according to a DDoS Threat Intelligence Report from NETSCOUT Systems Inc., a company that provides service assurance, security and business analytics.

The objective of a DDoS attack is to overwhelm an organization’s entire system with bogus traffic. Attacks are intended to deliberately disrupt availability. This often leads to service slowdowns or outages that can thwart revenue streams, delay operations, deter productivity, and significantly heighten risks.

While DDoS attacks are carried out by a range of threat actors, one type that has escalated involves “hacktivists” who target critical infrastructure in the banking and financial services, government, and utilities sectors, the report said.

Considered a utility, broadband/telecom ranks among the top 10 targeted vertical sectors in the U.S. Key industries, such as broadband, have experienced a 55% increase in attacks over the past four years, according to the report.

Hacktivism (internet activism) uses hacking as a form of civil disobedience to promote an agenda or societal change. The DDoS Threat Intelligence Report described these attacks as “significant threats that disrupt vital civilian services in countries that oppose the threat actors’ ideologies.”

Richard Hummel, director of threat intelligence at NETSCOUT, said, “Hacktivist activities continue to plague global organizations with more sophisticated and coordinated DDoS attacks against multiple targets simultaneously. As adversaries use more resilient, take-down-resistant networks, detection, and mitigation are more challenging. This report gives network operations teams insights to fine-tune their strategies to stay ahead of these evolving threats.”

The latest report, which covers the first half of 2024, showed there was a 43% increase in the number of application-layer attacks and a 30% increase in volumetric attacks — two of the three primary types of DDoS attacks.

Application-layer attacks target specific implementation details of a protocol or service, causing resource exhaustion, the report described. Volumetric attacks, as defined by the report, aim to completely saturate the network capacity of the target, negating an endpoint’s ability to send or receive legitimate traffic, causing packets to be buffered and dropped.

During the first half of 2024, volumetric attacks accounted for most of the approximately 41,000 DDoS attacks that NETSCOUT’s teams observe daily.

NETSCOUT’s global threat analysis and collection platform, ATLAS, provides benchmarks for things such as the top targeted industries and total attack frequency per country or region, among many other data. Following are the top 10 vertical industries attacked in the U.S. in the first half of 2024.

Rank    Vertical                                                                                   Frequency

1          Wired Telecommunications Carriers                                      512,812

2          All Other Telecommunications                                               126,112

3          Data Processing Hosting and Related Services                       105,519

4          Computing Infrastructure Providers Data Processing

Web Hosting and Related Services                                      83,250

5          Internet Publishing and Broadcasting and

Web Search Portals                                                              46,281

6          Wireless Telecommunications Carriers

(except Satellite)                                                                  45,450

7          Web Search Portals and All Other Information Services        32,077

8          Computer Terminal and Other Computer Peripheral

Equipment Manufacturing                                                   10,979

9          Educational Support Services                                                 10,522

10        Hobby Toy and Game Stores                                                   10,061

“It is our belief that a well-prepared network can withstand any DDoS attack. Achieving this state requires the right equipment, planning, testing, training, and continuous improvement. A general state of preparedness for any threat, DDoS included, can be achieved by following NIST guidelines,” advised NETSCOUT in its report.

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