Gaming Became Industry Most Affected by DDoS Attacks in 2019

Any organization with an online footprint is always exposed to DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks, and new data from Imperva shows no industry has more to fear than Games and Gambling.

The Gaming industry accounted for 35.92% of the total DDoS attacks in 2019, followed by Gambling with 31.25%, and Computers and Internet with 26.51%. On the other side of the spectrum comes Business, at 3.37%, and Finance, with 2.95%.

Gaming represents such a large portion of DDoS attacks primarily because of players’ willingness to do anything to win. Just recently, Ubisoft sued a DDoS-for-Hire service that was offering players a way to disrupt matches, which resulted in the server choosing the winner from the side that was still online.

The fact that the Gaming industry takes a large slice of the pie is in accordance with the rest of the data. 51% of all attacks lasted less than 15 minutes, and most of them were aimed at the same targets.

Finally, it looks like most of the network layer DDoS attacks occurred in East Asia, accounting for 77.7% of reports worldwide, with India taking first place, at 22.57%.

DDoS assaults have been around since a 15-year old hacker attacked several e-commerce websites, including Amazon, two decades ago. Even today, Amazon remains the top target when it comes to DDoS attacks, although now for different reasons.

In 2000, Amazon was targeted because it was one of the few major e-commerce sites. In 2019, Amazon was the primary provider of infrastructure-as-a-service, or simply put of cloud-related services. The Gaming industry widely uses its servers, so it’s no surprise that the Bitdefender’s Mid-Year Threat Landscape Report for 2019 identified Amazon as the most targeted cloud service, accounting for 25.92% of attacks.