Environmental Websites Throttled by COP28 Crossfire’s DDoS Onslaught

In the last quarter of 2023, there was a significant increase in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks targeting environmental services’ websites, according to a report by Cloudflare. The report found a 61,839% spike in HTTP DDoS attack traffic against environmental services, marking a shift away from cryptocurrency-related attacks. Cloudflare observed a similar trend during previous United Nations Climate Change Conferences (COP26 and COP27) and other UN-related environmental events. This highlights the growing intersection between environmental issues and cybersecurity. DDoS attacks aim to disrupt websites and online services by overwhelming them with more traffic than they can handle. Cloudflare identified three main types of DDoS attacks: HTTP request intensive attacks, IP packet-intensive attacks, and bit-intensive attacks. Globally, DDoS attacks were thriving in 2023. Cloudflare mitigated over 5.2 million HTTP DDoS attacks consisting of over 26 trillion requests that year. However, the amount of HTTP DDoS attack requests actually declined by 20% compared to 2022. On the other hand, network-layer DDoS attacks surged by 85%. Other findings from the report include an increase in DDoS attacks related to the Israel-Hamas conflict and an increase in attacks targeting Taiwan-related websites.