India Second Largest Source Of HTTP DDoS Attacks In Q3 2022: Report

India has moved up a place to become the second largest source of HTTP DDoS attack traffic in Q3 2022. China was the largest source of HTTP DDoS attack traffic in the quarter, according to a report. 

While the attack traffic originating from China-registered IP addresses increased by 29 per cent year-on-year (YoY) and 19 per cent quarter-on-quarter (QoQ), those coming from India showed a huge spike of 61 per cent YoY.

After India, the main sources of these attacks were the US (which dropped two places since Q2) and Brazil.

An HTTP DDoS attack is a type of volumetric distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack designed to overwhelm a targeted server with HTTP requests. Once the target has been saturated with requests and is unable to respond to normal traffic, denial-of-service will occur for additional requests from actual users, according to Cloudflare.

Speaking to BW Businessworld, Samuel Sathyajith, Head of India and SAARC Region, Cloudflare said, “Generally, what we have seen is that there have been a host of compromised devices and a lack of knowledge and awareness in India. This means that these resources here are being used to generate attacks.”

Courtesy: Cloudflare

The Cloudflare report from Q3 2022 highlighted that there has been a drop in attack traffic originating from Ukrainian and Russian IP addresses — a decrease of 29 per cent and 11 per cent QoQ, respectively. However, YoY, the attack traffic from within these countries still increased by 47 per cent and 18 per cent, respectively.

Meanwhile, attack traffic originating from Japanese IP addresses have increased by 130 per cent YoY in Q3.

The report also noted that multi-terabit DDoS attacks have become increasingly frequent. In Q3, Cloudflare automatically detected and mitigated multiple attacks that exceeded 1 Tbps. The largest attack was a 2.5 Tbps DDoS attack launched by a Mirai botnet variant, aimed at the Minecraft server, Wynncraft. This was the largest attack Cloudflare has ever seen from the on bitrate terms.