Due to a co-ordinated, large-scale campaign of attacks against the iGaming industry, Continent 8 blocked a staggering 350 days’ worth of DDoS attacks across 3,367 separate DDoS events in Q4 2022 alone – a new record for the iGaming’s most trusted infrastructure partner.
Craig Lusher from our Secure team reviews the latest company attack data.
A major DDoS attack wave hit the iGaming industry in October and December 2022. This campaign was well orchestrated and coincided with the World Cup and Christmas holidays. Unlike specific targeted attacks which attempt to saturate Internet capacity with a high traffic volume, Continent 8 witnessed a large number of simultaneous attacks across a breadth of businesses in the industry. This is certainly one of the biggest and most complicated campaigns against the industry Continent 8 has ever had to defend against.
Cybercrime is very much on the rise with attackers finding new ways in which to exploit applications and infrastructure to their advantage – no business is immune to an attack. But have you ever considered the cost of a DDoS attack that takes your business completely offline?
In the most recent quarter, we mitigated an attack that lasted an astounding 87 hours. Assuming this company has a yearly revenue of $100m, it would have lost $993k if the attack was successful at taking the business offline.
Q4 2022 DDoS stats
Our latest statistics show that Continent 8 saw off a total of 3,367 attacks. Of these, 51 customers had repeat attacks which means multiple attacks occurred against the same customer within a 24-hour period.
North America was the most attacked location throughout the period, and the month of December was the busiest. This is not surprising considering hackers are more active around the holiday season. Why? Reasons include an increase in traffic expected on websites as customers purchase Christmas gifts, and at the same time IT professionals in businesses are taking annual leave.
The stats for the period from 1 October to 31 December 2022 relate to our customers based in different locations around the world. Key highlights include:
- Blocked 3,367 DDoS attacks, up a whopping 3,200 from 167 in the previous quarter a 425% increase
- Due to the many simultaneous attacks, customers were under attack for an astonishing total of 8,396 hours during the period, which equates to 350 full days of simultaneous attacks up from only 2 days in Q4 2021
- Longest sustained attack was 87 hours (3 and a half days), up from 31.4 hours in the previous quarter
- 51 customers had repeat attacks within a 24-hour period
- One customer was attacked 272 times during the period
- Average attack size was only 2.7Gbps, down from 75.5Gbps in the previous quarter
- Peak attack size hit 305.4Gbps, down from 644.7Gbps in the previous quarter
- Peak packets per second is 448Mpps up from 119Mpps in the previous quarter
Craig Lusher, Senior Product Specialist – Secure, at Continent 8 Technologies, said: “Our latest quarter statistics show a huge increase in attacks, particularly in December, a seasonal trend we have seen for many years now. However, attack tactics have changed; When comparing Q4 2021 with Q4 2022, attack peak volume is down from 1.9Tbps to 305Gbps, however the number of simultaneous attacks is up in an attempt to overwhelm the DDoS scrubbers. Due to simultaneous attacks, we saw our scrubbers mitigating attacks for a total duration of 8,396 hours (350 days) in Q4 alone. This total mitigation duration is up a massive 16,625% on Q4 stats in 2021.
“We often talk about the increase in the number of attacks globally across sectors, as well as their complexity and scale, but do people really understand how much an attack could cost their business?
“During this quarter we saw a sustained attack of 87 hours which would have been highly damaging for the company had they not had mitigation in place.”
Continent 8’s DDoS Protection
Named a key player in the DDoS attack solution market (source: Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack Solution Market Industry Development 2022 – 2028), we have been protecting the world’s most valuable information for 25 years. Our comprehensive cyber security solutions include effective and scalable protection against L3-7 DDoS attacks.
Our mitigation service provides an effective defence against multi-vector volumetric attacks. Key features include:
- Geographically distributed high-capacity IP network
- Complete infrastructure protection with Layer 3-7 Volumetric protection
- Specific L7 application layer and API protection using in house Fortinet WAAP platform
- High-capacity scrubbing centres
- Edge filtering technology to filter attack traffic at the network edge
- Major DDoS event offloading
- Highly experienced team and a Customer Support Portal to view and interpret data flow and attack events
Our solution continues to evolve and in recent months we have amplified our scrubbing capacity to 2.5+Tbps, as well as increased our scrubbing centres geographically deployed across multiple continents. Locations include Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Miami, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Singapore, Hong Kong and Sao Paulo.
Our proven platform is one you can rely on with a capacity only matched by the largest DDoS providers on the planet. Learn more about our DDoS solutions here or contact Craig via craig.lusher@continent8.com
