DDoS Attacks on Critical Infrastructure Re-shaping Geopolitical Conflicts
When malicious attempt is made to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, either in service or network or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic, is termed as DDoS attack.
DDoS attacks plays dominant role waging cyberwarfare. In the last decade DDoS attacks have become easier, cheaper and aggressive, takes advantage of the armed conflicts happening around the world, adding fuel to new waves of DDoS attacks and re-shaping the geopolitical events.
The effectiveness of DDoS based attack is achieved via multiple compromised computer systems, utilized as sources of attack traffic. This may include exploited machines, computers or IoT devices preventing normal network connectivity or even exploiting the cloud to launch attacks.
Throughout the year of 2024, DDoS attacks were intricately tied to social/political events, including Israel experiencing a 2,844% surge tied to hostage rescues and political conflicts, Georgia enduring a 1,489% increase during the lead-up to the passage of the “Russia Bill,” Mexico having a 218% increase during national elections, and the United Kingdom experiencing a 152% increase on the day the Labour Party resumed session in Parliament.
DDoS attacks are capable of overwhelming a target at various levels affecting legitimate users of services During Paris Olympics 2024 the France’s cyber security agency had been on high alert for cyber attacks that had the potential to disrupt the organizing committee, ticketing or transport.
Threat actors are taking advantage as they find opportunity to link them to sociopolitical events such as elections, civil protests, and policy disputes or creating tension where government of nations are involved in passing major amendments that may be not so popular among groups that oppose it.
Between July 26 and August 11, government cyber security agency Anssi recorded 119 reports targeting government entities as well as sports, transport and telecoms infrastructure and DDoS in nature.
Why is DDoS attack popular with attackers?
DDoS has emerged as the go-to tool for cyberwarfare as per experts, making remediation more challenging.
AI and Automation Drive Scale and Impact
Botnets Playing a Bigger Role
DDoS Attacks are Adaptive and Persistent
Unparalleled Attack Visibility
Subsequently DDoS attacks plays a dominant role in re-shaping geopolitical events. And if we notice to launch any kind of DDoS attack, attackers use malware to create a network of bots i.e. internet-connected devices to infected with malware and send direct traffic to targets, create confusion and finally slow down, halting communication.
The way a DDoS attack is planted, can halt any kind of communication that uses internet like watching video, accessing ATM machines, accessing websites ,emails. Basically any kind of communication that access resources via the internet can be stopped. This can be replaced by any wrong information causing substantial damage to organization and government bodies.
Recent example of DDoS attack was the Karnataka’s Kaveri 2.0
The state’s online property registration portal, became the latest casualty in a growing wave of cyberattacks targeting India’s digital infrastructure. The portal, launched in 2023 to streamline land registration services, faced sporadic yet crippling outages. Initially suspected to be a technical glitch, investigations by the Revenue Department and the E-Governance Department revealed a more sinister cause—a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
The attack overwhelmed Kaveri 2.0’s servers, making citizen services practically inaccessible for days. Fake accounts were created to generate excessive entries in the system, while malicious requests flooded the platform, causing a severe slowdown.
The example above sets a reminder that DDoS attacks will continue to be a preferred weapon against government services, financial institutions, and large enterprises.
The prominent attack of DDoS include
- Application-layer attacks
- Protocol attacks
- DNS amplification/reflection attacks
- Volumetric attacks
Application-layer DDoS attacks target specific vulnerabilities in web applications to prevent the application from performing as intended. These DDoS attacks often target the communication protocols involved in exchanging data between two applications over the internet.
Protocol attacks target weaknesses and vulnerabilities in internet communications protocols in Layer 3 and Layer 4 of the OSI model. These attacks attempt to consume and exhaust compute capacity of various network infrastructure resources like servers or firewalls by sending malicious.
Domain Name System are specific type of volumetric DDoS where hackers spoof the IP address of their target to send large amounts of requests to open DNS servers. In response, these DNS servers respond back to the malicious requests by the spoofed IP address, thereby creating an attack.
This attack is also known as DNS amplification attack as at high speed large volume of traffic created from the DNS replies overwhelms the targeted organization’s services. This makes them unavailable and prevent legitimate traffic from reaching its intended destination.
Volume-based DDoS attacks are directed at OSI Layers 3 and 4, overwhelming a target with a flood of traffic from multiple sources and eventually consuming all of the target’s available bandwidth, causing it to crash.
DDoS attack mitigation service
DDoS attack protection services can mitigate threats that organizations can or face through a mitigation provider that takes a defense-in-depth approach can keep organizations and end users safe.
Subsequently this will reduce the attack surface and business risk associated with DDoS attacks, prevent business downtime. The websites are more secured and guarded from going offline with speedy response.
There are On-prem or on-network DDoS protection, involving physical and/or virtualized appliances that reside in a company’s data center and integrate with their edge routers to stop malicious DDoS attacks at the edge of their network. Cybercriminals operating with either fast or slow techniques can be caught with this on prem DDoS protection also reducing operational cost.
DDoS attack and criminals have also increased attacks on the application layer of financial organizations’ systems, targeting the more resource-intensive components of applications.
We at Intruceptlabs are advancing with our products lazed with security mechanisms, continuously monitoring and mitigating attacks in real-time. These solutions leverage advanced technologies – AI to ensure there is no disruption in network availability and security.
MXDR from Intruceptlabs
MXDR gives security analysts and SOC managers a clear view across the organization, helping them fully understand the extent and context of an attack. It also simplifies workflows by automatically handling alerts, allowing for faster detection of both known and unknown threats.
MXDR is a full proof security layer helping identify threats without having to purchase, implement, and oversee several solutions or find, hire, and manage a team security analyst.
AI & Automation driving the DDoS attack scale
Now with AI the DDoS-for-hire services have become more powerful using AI for CAPTCHA bypassing, and many hackers employ automation to enable dynamic, multi-target campaigns. This somehow exploit the infrastructure techniques such as carpet bombing, geo-spoofing, and IPv6 to expand attack surfaces. An inexperienced person can launch significant DDoS attack campaigns causing substantial damage.
DDoS attacks intricately tied to geo-political & social events
In the year 2024 world over experienced a 550% surge in DDos attack and that includes Israel’s dilemma in hostage rescues and political conflicts; Georgia enduring a 1 489% increase during the lead-up to the passage of the “Russia Bill”; Mexico having a 218% increase during national elections; and the UK experiencing a 152% increase on the day the Labour Party resumed session in Parliament.
“DDoS has emerged as the go-to tool for cyberwarfare,” states Richard Hummel, director: threat intelligence at NetScout. “NoName057(16) continues to be the leading actor for politically motivated DDoS campaigns targeting governments, infrastructure, and organisations. In 2024, they repeatedly targeted government services in the UK, Belgium, and Spain.”
DDoS attack on Internet Archive:
The attack on Internet Archive, on 9th Oct 2024 was a DDoS attack where in a devastating data breach occurred and a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. This temporarily took away the service offline. This incident highlights how DDoS attacks have become a weapon of choice for hacktivists seeking to make geopolitical statements, often targeting seemingly unrelated victims.
The attackers justified their actions by stating that the Internet Archive “belongs to the USA” and the U.S. government supports Israel, a geopolitical issue.
These incident call for a robust DDoS defense strategies to protect service availability, otherwise a critical concern for organizations awaits to protect the digital landscape.
At enterprise level investment on robust DDoS defense strategies is imperative as hacktivists continue to use DDoS as a weapon to make geopolitical statement.
A DDoS attack targeted Elon Musk’s social media platform X in August 2024, aimed at disrupting his interview with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
X was targeted again in March 2025, when a massive cyberattack prevented some users from accessing the platform. All attacks attributed to DDoS and shows how the attack module has become a weapon in geopolitics.
The ongoing Russia Ukraine war is another example including the Israel-Hamas war, where significant surge in DDoS attacks have been found. Akamai research highlighted how DDoS attack targeted 3,000 financial institutions as it was noted that financial organization have a their critical role in the global economy and target for hackers. The module of DDoS attack in this case was to disrupt the core infrastructure of internet connections by overwhelming their routers and servers.
Source:
Geopolitical and Technology Impact in DDoS