The first half of 2024 saw a significant rise in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, in both frequency and intensity, according to a new report from Radware.

Global political tensions were cited as a major driver of the increase, the report highlighted, with hacktivists groups claiming responsibility for 1000 to 1200 DDoS attacks a month in the first half of 2024.

Ukraine was the most targeted country by hacktivists during the first half of the year, followed by the US, Israel, India, and Moldova.

Pro-Russia hacktivist group NoName057 was the most active threat actor, a title maintained from the year prior.

Government websites were also the most targeted since January 2023, also mainly targeting Ukraine, but also Israel, India, Moldova, Poland, Senegal, and Spain.

Other notable targets besides government websites included X (formally Twitter), Twitch, Amazon, and Spotify.

Application-layer DDoS attacks also tripled between 2022 and 2023, and quadrupled between H1 2023 and H1 2024.

The number of malicious queries increased by 76% in just the first half of 2024 compared to the whole year in 2023.

Researchers also saw a surge in web DDoS attacks, with a 137% increase in Q1 2024 over Q4 2023, followed by an 85% increase in Q2 2024 over Q1.

A majority of those attacks targeted EMEA organisations, with researchers citing an influence by geopolitical conflicts and significant events like EU parliamentary elections, and the Olympic Games taking place in Paris.

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Network-layer DDoS attacks also saw a rise, with financial organisations experiencing the highest network-layer attack activities (44%), followed by healthcare (17%), technology (10%), and government (7.2%).

Web application and API attacks increased by 22% in H1 2024, compared to H2 2023, with vulnerability exploitation as the leading attack category (33%), and North America as the most targeted region with 66% of the cyber-attacks.

The report also found that bad bot activity saw a significant rise – an increase of 61% compared to H1 2023.

The presence of web crawlers detected in the first half of 2024 was 5.8%, increase from below 4% in 2021 and nearly 7% in 2023.