DDoS Threat Report 2020 Q3

The increase in online gaming attracted attention from attackers, resulting in nearly 77% of cyber attacks targeting online gaming and gambling industries in Q3 2020. More than a third of these entertainment attacks focused on online gaming targets. Nexusguard analysts also reported a 287% increase in total DDoS attacks in the third quarter compared to the same period last year. Online gaming platforms’ sensitivity to latency and availability issues makes them ideal DDoS attack targets, and the online gaming environment is target-rich for perpetrators to capitalize during the pandemic.

  • Online Gaming Industry is now a Hotbed for DDoS Attacks: 99.5% of cyber attacks were volumetric in nature, with 99.4% of attacks consisting of single vector attacks. Perpetrators aim to consume all bandwidth so that gamers suffer the side effects of latency and then switch to game server hosts with faster and more stable connectivity.
  • DDoS Protection Service Industries need to Step up their Game: Online gaming is snowballing in part due to the growth of cloud computing as well as the limited options for home entertainment during the pandemic, providing cyber attackers with a wide population of targets to exploit. Game service providers, CSPs and other organizations should take steps to safeguard service, including segregating applications to minimize collateral damage or rehearsing incident response drills to reduce service disruption during attacks.”said Juniman Kasman, chief technology officer for Nexusguard.

Based on our Q3 findings, a huge 23.7 Gbps DDoS attack was launched to interrupt the user login function of an online game; the attack attempted to paralyze the infrastructure and saturate the bandwidth of the game service provider. 

Online gaming represents a large chunk of DDoS attacks owing to gamers’ willingness to do anything to win. Readily available DDoS-for-hire services have been commonly used to launch DDoS attacks to disrupt gaming matches, and gain the upper hand against gaming opponents.

You may be interested in

DDoS Statistical Report for 2022

This is the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Statistical Report for 2022. This comprehensive report unveils the global shift in the DDoS threat landscape, providing key observations, metrics, and trends for the year. Discover the types of att...

DDoS Statistical Report for 1HY 2022

In the first half of 2022, the total attack count and average attack size increased by 75.60% and decreased by 55.97% respectively compared to the figures recorded in the second half of 2021. Compared to the second half of 2021, the maximum attack size...

DDoS Statistical Report for 2021

In 2021, the total attack count and average attack size both fell by 13.32% and 50.00% respectively compared to the figures registered in 2020. Compared to 2020, the maximum attack size increased by 296.62%, with the maximum attack size clocking in at 699.20 Gbps. Besides, Read More >

DDoS Threat Report 2021 Q3

Q3 saw a notable trend in which attackers launched DDoS attacks at single targets within a CSP, attributing an attack size increase of 544% QoQ and 232% YoY. Over 55% of attacks focused on hitting a specific service with high volumes of traffic simultaneously, and according to our research, sever...

DDoS Threat Report FHY 2021

Small bit-and-piece DDoS attacks boomed by 233% in the first half of 2021. As the pandemic carried on into 2021, hackers experimented with new attack patterns to avoid signature-based detection. More than 99% of all DDoS attacks were smaller than 10Gbps, as we had predicted in 2020. These small, ...