According to a report by Cloudflare, geopolitical tensions and elections are leading to an increase in malicious internet traffic.

Cloudflare outlines the current internet landscape in a research report and the picture is not always so pretty. According to Cloudflare, almost seven percent (6.8%) of global internet traffic today comes from malicious actors. That’s almost a full percentage point more than a year ago.

Cloudflare cites geopolitical tensions and the elections taking place in many countries this year as the main cause. Attacks on websites are therefore often staged with a political motive. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, pro-Russian groups have targeted websites of Western organizations.

Bigger and faster

An increase in malicious internet traffic also makes it more difficult to block malicious actors. DDoS attacks are becoming significantly more frequent and also larger in scale. Cloudflare says it will have to fend off 8 million DDoS attacks in the first half of 2024. 37 percent of the traffic the internet provider blocked was part of a DDoS attack.

French cloud provider OVHCloud recently reported a record-breaking DDoS attack. At peak times, attack waves reached up to 840 million requests per second at a bitrate of 2.5 Tbit/s.

Cloudflare also finds the speed at which vulnerabilities are exploited concerning. Cloudflare cites an incident in which a vulnerability was exploited just 22 minutes after the first proof of concept was released. This leaves security personnel with less and less time to intervene. Fast patching is more important than ever.