During the COP 28 climate summit, attackers attacked environmental organizations with DDoS attacks. Cloudflare points this out in its quarterly report on the issue.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, environmental organizations were a popular target for DDoS attacks. This was determined by the connectivity specialist Cloudflare. The number of DDoS attacks on the sector increased by 61,839 percent during the UN climate conference COP 28 compared to the previous year.

Cloudflare isn’t surprised. A similar trend emerged at previous climate conferences. Overall, half of DDoS attacks last quarter targeted environmental websites.

Topic attacks

DDoS attacks often follow a specific theme. As usual, the logistics industry was hit hard over the holidays and attacks on Taiwan increased in the run-up to the election.

Overall, Cloudflare saw a 117 percent year-over-year increase in network-level DDoS attacks in the fourth quarter of 2023. The largest attack involved 201 million requests per second.

DDoS stands for Distributed denial of service. A DDoS attack is not a classic hack, but a cyberattack in which a criminal attempts to saturate the connection to his target by sending a lot of malicious traffic to a website over the network. This malicious traffic usually comes from large botnets consisting of previously hacked computers. Imagine if a criminal suddenly sent 10,000 cars onto the road towards your workplace: then it would also be impossible for real customers and employees to reach their destination.