2024: The year of upticks in cyber warfare

Historical trends over the past decade prove that when global conflicts arise, it’s inevitable that we’ll begin to see widespread cyberattacks shortly thereafter. This has been the case during the recent happenings between Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Gaza. At the beginning of each crisis, we witnessed an immediate uptick in cyberattacks worldwide in areas such as DDoS, API and DNS attacks.

Following the Iranian missile strike in April, we have already seen and can expect a sustained increase in attacks — especially leading up to major upcoming events like the 2024 United States presidential election, the Olympic Games and the international soccer cup tournaments.

Everyone must be on high alert for the increasing threat of cyber warfare, and time is of the essence to establish preventative measures.

The spillover effect of geopolitical events

Geopolitical events spur cyberattacks because attackers want to sow chaos to gain advantage over their adversaries. Attackers gather intelligence and disrupt everything from critical infrastructure, politics and the economy. Monitoring the correlations between events like the Iranian missile strike and related attack traffic can help predict potential future attacks around similar events.

In the case of Iran, one cyber mitigation provider reported seeing approximately 2,130 DDoS attacks between April 12 and 13, around the time of the strike. In the days before, there was also an uptick in DDoS attacks, with the provider recording 1,494 attacks. This attack rate represented an astounding 589 percent increase from the April 2024 daily average for that provider.

In the aftermath of the strike, hacktivist groups also targeted key industries such as finance, government, utilities and education. Similarly, there was an uptick in DDoS threats from hacktivist groups against Jordanian organizations in response to their action in intercepting some of the Iranian missiles with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Attacks stemming from geopolitical motives can also impact enterprises by disrupting services or compromising sensitive data. The higher risk of attacks and potential repercussions reinforce the need for establishment of robust security…