Connect with us

Cyber Security

Cloudflare Outs Q2 2024 DDoS Attack Trends

Published

on

Cloudflare has released its DDoS report for the second quarter of 2024, revealing a concerning trend: a significant increase in DDoS attacks compared to last year. The report highlights a disturbing rise in DDoS attack complexity. Cloudflare’s automated defences had to work ten times harder to counter these sophisticated attacks, indicating attackers are wielding advanced tools previously associated with state-backed actors.

The report also finds a troubling rise in ransomware tactics used alongside DDoS attacks. In May 2024, 16% of Cloudflare’s customers reported experiencing extortion attempts alongside DDoS attacks. The report sheds light on the nature of these attacks:

  • Targets: China was the most attacked country, followed by Turkey, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The Information Technology & Services industry was the primary target, followed by Food & Beverages and Consumer Goods.
  • Attackers: While most victims couldn’t identify their attackers, those who did point to competitors, disgruntled users, and even state actors.
  • Attack Duration: Most attacks are short-lived, with over half ending within 10 minutes, emphasizing the need for automated defences.
  • Attack Size: While most attacks are relatively small, there has been an increase in larger attacks, with a significant number exceeding 1 million packets or requests per second.

Cloudflare’s report paints a picture of a rapidly evolving threat landscape. The rise of sophisticated attacks and an increase in ransomware tactics underscores the need for robust security solutions for businesses of all sizes.

Commenting on the report, Bashar Bashaireh, Managing Director & Head of Sales – Middle East and Türkiye at Cloudflare, “The majority of DDoS attacks are small and quick. However, even these attacks can disrupt online services that do not follow best practices for DDoS defense. Threat actor sophistication is increasing, perhaps due to the availability of Generative AI and developer copilots, resulting in attack code that delivers DDoS attacks that are harder to defend against. Even before the rise in attack sophistication, many organizations struggled to defend against these threats on their own. But they don’t need to. Cloudflare is here to help. We invest significant resources – so you don’t have to – to ensure our automated defenses, along with the entire portfolio of Cloudflare security products, can mitigate emerging threats.”

Cyber Security

GISEC Global 2025: Phishing, Data Breaches, Ransomware, and Supply Chain Attacks Causing Challenges

Published

on

Maher Jadallah, the Vice President for Middle East and North Africa at Tenable, says effective exposure management requires a unified view of the entire attack surface (more…)

Continue Reading

Cyber Security

GISEC Global 2025: A Place Where Innovation, Partnerships, and Leadership Come Together

Published

on

Meriam ElOuazzani, the Senior Regional Director for META at SentinelOne, says, the company will showcase its latest developments in AI-powered security solutions, reinforcing its position as a leader in this area (more…)

Continue Reading

Artificial Intelligence

Cequence Intros Security Layer to Protect Agentic AI Interactions

Published

on

Cequence Security has announced significant enhancements to its Unified API Protection (UAP) platform to deliver a comprehensive security solution for agentic AI development, usage, and connectivity. This enhancement empowers organizations to secure every AI agent interaction, regardless of the development framework. By implementing robust guardrails, the solution protects both enterprise-hosted AI applications and external AI APIs, preventing sensitive data exfiltration through business logic abuse and ensuring regulatory compliance.

There is no AI without APIs, and the rapid growth of agentic AI applications has amplified concerns about securing sensitive data during their interactions. These AI-driven exchanges can inadvertently expose internal systems, create significant vulnerabilities, and jeopardize valuable data assets. Recognising this critical challenge, Cequence has expanded its UAP platform, introducing an enhanced security layer to govern interactions between AI agents and backend services specifically. This new layer of security enables customers to detect and prevent AI bots such as ChatGPT from OpenAI and Perplexity from harvesting organizational data.

Internal telemetry across Global 2000 deployments shows that the overwhelming majority of AI-related bot traffic, nearly 88%, originates from large language model infrastructure, with most requests obfuscated behind generic or unidentified user agents. Less than 4% of this traffic is transparently attributed to bots like GPTBot or Gemini. Over 97% of it comes from U.S.-based IP addresses, highlighting the concentration of risk in North American enterprises. Cequence’s ability to detect and govern this traffic in real time, despite the lack of clear identifiers, reinforces the platform’s unmatched readiness for securing agentic AI in the wild.

Key enhancements to Cequence’s UAP platform include:

  • Block unauthorized AI data harvesting: Understanding that external AI often seeks to learn by broadly collecting data without obtaining permission, Cequence provides organizations with the critical capability to manage which AI, if any, can interact with their proprietary information.
  • Detect and prevent sensitive data exposure: Empowers organizations to effectively detect and prevent sensitive data exposure across all forms of agentic AI. This includes safeguarding against external AI harvesting attempts and securing data within internal AI applications. The platform’s intelligent analysis automatically differentiates between legitimate data access during normal application usage and anomalous activities signaling sensitive data exfiltration, ensuring comprehensive protection against AI-related data loss.
  • Discover and manage shadow AI: Automatically discovers and classifies APIs from agentic AI tools like Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce Agentforce, presenting a unified view alongside customers’ internal and third-party APIs. This comprehensive visibility empowers organizations to easily manage these interactions and effectively detect and block sensitive data leaks, whether from external AI harvesting or internal AI usage.
  • Seamless integration: Integrates easily into DevOps frameworks for discovering internal AI applications and generates OpenAPI specifications that detail API schemas and security mechanisms, including strong authentication and security policies. Cequence delivers powerful protection without relying on third-party tools, while seamlessly integrating with the customer’s existing cybersecurity ecosystem. This simplifies management and security enforcement.

“Gartner predicts that by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024, enabling 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously. We’ve taken immediate action to extend our market-leading API security and bot management capabilities,” said Ameya Talwalkar, CEO of Cequence. “Agentic AI introduces a new layer of complexity, where every agent behaves like a bidirectional API. That’s our wheelhouse. Our platform helps organizations embrace innovation at scale without sacrificing governance, compliance, or control.”

These extended capabilities will be generally available in June.

Continue Reading
Advertisement

Follow Us

Trending

Copyright © 2021 Security Review Magazine. Rysha Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.