The environmental services industry witnessed an "unprecedented surge" in HTTP-based distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, accounting for half of all its HTTP traffic. This marks a 61,839% increase in DDoS attack traffic year-over-year, web infrastructure and security company Cloudflare said in its DDoS threat report for 2023 Q4 published last week. "This surge in cyber attacks coincided with COP 28, which ran from November 30th to December 12th, 2023," security researchers Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco said, describing it as a "disturbing trend in the cyber threat landscape." The uptick in HTTP attacks targeting environmental services websites is part of a larger trend observed annually over the past few years, specifically during COP 26 and COP 27, as well as other United Nations environment-related resolutions or announcements. "This recurring pattern underscores the growing intersection between environmental issues and cyber security, a nexus that is increasingly becoming a focal point for attackers in the digital age," the researchers said. Despite the environmental services sector becoming a new target in Q4 2023, the cryptocurrency industry continues to be the primary casualty in terms of the volume of HTTP DDoS attack requests. With more than 330 billion HTTP requests targeting it, the attack traffic represents more than 4% of all HTTP DDoS traffic for the quarter. Gaming and gambling and telecommunications emerged as the second and third most attacked…Read More