A Threat Landscape report from cyber security company Imperva has revealed that the number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks more than doubled globally last year, with the upward trend continuing in the first half of this year.

DDoS attacks overwhelm a target system with excessive traffic from multiple sources (multiple compromised systems, often infected with malware), causing it to slow down or crash, thereby denying service to legitimate users.

Imperva’s report attributes the increase in this type of attack to factors like geopolitical tensions, e.g. attacks on Ukraine are up by 519 per cent and attacks on Israel are up by 118 per cent. The report identifies the most attacked industries as being financial services, telecoms, and ISPs, which collectively account for around 60 per cent of all Layer 7 (flooding a website with fake traffic) DDoS attacks.

The advice to businesses looking to protect themselves from DDoS attacks is to implement robust security measures, such as using DDoS protection services, monitoring traffic, and having an incident response plan.