As conflict between Israel and the Palestinian militant Islamist organisation Hamas escalates, new research has revealed the impact politics has had on cyberattack trends. Tension between countries and changing political landscapes can now often be linked to cybercrime campaigns worldwide. From constant spats between the US and China to increased targeting of Syrian and Thai targets during political unrest, digital weaponry is now a key tool for groups to broadcast their own political messages, spy on governmental agencies and steal valuable data. In a new report released by Arbor Networks, anonymized traffic and DDoS attack data from over 290 ISPs that have deployed Arbor’s Peakflow SP product — collated and analyzed as part of Arbor’s ATLAS initiative — it appears that DDoS attacks are rising in number and volume as a result of the Israel-Hamas conflict. The graph below depicts the number of reported DDoS attacks initiated against Israel daily over the 1 June to 3 August period this year: Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are used to flood a website or service with traffic to the point systems cannot cope, denying other users access to the website. Arbor detected a rise in the number of DDoS attacks targeting Israel in the first week of July, going from an average of 30 attacks per day to an average of 150 attacks initiated per day in July — peaking at 429 attacks on July 21st. Linking these cyberattacks to political situations, 30 June is when Israel publicly attributed the deaths of three kidnapped Israeli teenagers to Hamas, and on 7 July, “Operation Protective Edge” was launched by the country. As the political conflict raged on, so did the frequency of DDoS attacks until a drop occurred on 28 July lasting through 2 August. Arbor says the drop in attacks roughly correlates with cease fire talks which began 27 July. From 28 July through 2 August, there were 192 attacks recorded in total. On 3 August, the number of DDoS attacks rose sharply, with 268 attacks in total. In addition to the number of DDoS attacks over these time periods, the security researchers also noticed an increase in the peak size of these attacks. In the graph below, we can see that in June, no attacks exceeded 12Gbps. In July, seven DDoS attacks exceeded this size, with the largest peaking at 22.56Gbps on 12 July. When cease-fire talks fell apart on 3 August, the largest DDoS attack was recorded at a size of 29Gbps. The duration of DDoS attacks has also increased. In June, the average duration was 20 minutes — with a peak duration of 24 hours — and in July, the average duration was 1 hour 39 minutes. “As the intensity of the Israeli-Hamas conflict has increased, so has the number, size and duration of the DDoS attacks targeting Israel,” the researchers say. “Additionally, it even appears as if the attackers have made an effort to adhere to the “real world” calls for a cease-fire, resuming their attacks when the cease fire fell through.” Source: http://www.zdnet.com/israel-hamas-conflict-sparks-surge-in-ddos-attacks-7000032375/#ftag=RSS14dc6a9

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Israel-Hamas conflict sparks surge in DDoS attacks