A report by StormWall stated that the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region surged by a whopping 183 per cent year-on-year.
Based on an in-depth analysis of attacks against the company’s customers, the report illuminates the significant impact of escalating geopolitical tensions on cybersecurity threats in the region.
The report identified the UAE at 21 per cent, Saudi Arabia at 18 per cent, and Iran at 14 per cent as the most targeted countries in the MENA region in Q1 2024. It pointed out that Iran and Israel’s high ranking (12 per cent) underscores the prevalence of politically motivated attacks in today’s DDoS threat landscape.
The report added that a notable driver of this surge of DDoS attacks can be attributed to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has, in fact, fuelled a wave of hacktivism. It stated government services bore the brunt of these attacks, suffering 34 per cent of all incidents in the region. It experienced a whopping 218 per cent year-over-year increase.
The situation further intensified following Iran’s direct cyberattack on Israel on April 13, 2024, marking a significant escalation in DDoS activity.
Cyber attackers focused on critical infrastructure, particularly targeting supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and energy management systems (EMS). These attacks aimed to disrupt operations and threaten business continuity, highlighting the vulnerabilities in the region’s critical infrastructure.
The energy sector emerged as the second most targeted vertical in Q1 2024, with 18% of all attacks and a 206 per cent year-over-year increase.
In Q1 2024, the average number of botnet nodes in the MENA region quadrupled from 4,000 to 16,000. This exponential growth in botnet capacity has enabled attackers to launch more powerful and sophisticated DDoS attacks.
Notably, carpet bombing attacks, which target a wide range of IP addresses within a network, increased by 264 per cent year-over-year. These attacks saturate the entire infrastructure with traffic, causing widespread disruption.
Analysing the breakdown of attacks by protocol, the report reveals that 83 per cent targeted HTTP and HTTPS protocols. Attacks on TCP and UDP protocols accounted for 10 per cent while DNS attacks significantly increased, rising from three per cent last year to five per cent in Q1 2024.
This shift in attack patterns highlights the region’s evolving strategies of cyber attackers.The StormWall report is a critical reminder of the growing cyber threats facing the MENA region, exacerbated by geopolitical conflicts.
As DDoS attacks become more frequent and sophisticated, there is an urgent need for enhanced cybersecurity measures to protect critical infrastructure and government services from the escalating threat landscape.
