DDoS | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The past year has marked a decisive shift in the way Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks operate. DDoS used to mean, simply speaking, the overwhelming of targets with massive amounts of traffic. But now, DDoS attacks have evolved into precision-guided threats – and this transformation can be partly attributed to AI.  The acceleration is measurable. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, DDoS incidents surged by 358 percent compared to the same period in 2024, according to Cloudflare. Even more concerning, the proportion of attacks that caused actual production downtime rose by 53 percent. This is not just a spike. It is a sign that attackers are fundamentally changing how DDoS campaigns are planned, launched, and adapted in real time. The consequences are significant: organizations that rely on legacy DDoS defenses or irregular testing methods are finding themselves exposed, often without knowing it. How Attackers are Enhancing DDoS Attacks DDoS attacks historically reli...

Despite the widespread adoption of DDoS protection solutions, disruptive DDoS attacks continue to make headlines. Why? Even "basic" attacks are bypassing established defenses, as evidenced by the recent DDoS attack on X.  Our analysis, based on over 100,000 hours of annual attack simulations, reveals that all deployed DDoS protections are highly vulnerable — gaps that often go unnoticed until an attack successfully disrupts services. With no effective way to address these weaknesses preemptively, organizations remain exposed. This article examines why DDoS attacks persist and continue to inflict significant damage. How Even Simple Attacks Bring Down the Best DDoS Protections In 2024, Cloudflare reported more than 25 million DDoS attacks - representing a 53% YoY increase. This growing number of DDoS attacks and their escalating cost from damage begs the question: What are we missing? And how can the risk of these attacks (and the damage they cause) be reduced?  Unlike oth...

Since Russia's latest escalation in 2022 with its invasion of Ukraine, hacktivism has surged, impacting both private and public sectors through DDoS attacks, defacements, and disinformation campaigns. These cyberattacks align with geopolitical events. As 2024 saw over 50 countries holding elections, this creates particularly ripe conditions for influence operations such as misinformation and propaganda campaigns. DDoS attacks have also intensified, with one pro-Russian hacktivist group alone claiming over 6,000 attacks since March 2022. Driven by political tensions and geopolitical conflicts, we saw a significant increase in both volume and intensity. Hacktivists are now more experienced, leveraging DDoS-for-hire services and sophisticated tools. To better understand the complex threat landscape, we aim to explore current hacktivism more deeply, examining its various facets and connections to geopolitical tensions, building on our previous findings. This article doesn't cover ...