<p><img alt="Cryptocurrency services are being DDoSed more frequently than banks, in Q1 2021." height="391" src="https://content2.stormwall.network/or/articles/crypto-more-than-banks_w500-1643810493697.jpg" width="500" /></p>

<p>StormWalls data suggests that DDoS actors are beginning to shift their attention from banking and traditional fintech services to crypto, in 2021.</p>

If a long-term bullish trend returns, we can expect cryptocurrencies to make it into the Top 5 industries most vulnerable to DDoS attacks.

DDoS attacks on cryptocurrency services | StormWall

<p><em>8 september 2021</em></p>

<h1>Cryptocurrency Services Are Being DDoSed More Frequently Than Banks&nbsp;in Q1, 2021</h1>

<p>StormWall&#39;s data suggests that DDoS actors are beginning to shift their attention from banking and traditional fintech services to crypto, in 2021.</p>

<p>This shift could have been triggered by the recent bull run when thousands of companies began creating new crypto assets and attempting to crowd-fund their inventions. At the same time, centralized exchanges experienced a massive rise in trading activity, and thus &mdash; revenue. This activity generated a convenient target for excretion attacks. Threat actors are threatening to bring down websites with DDoS unless the victim pays a ransom.</p>

<p><img alt="Cryptocurrency services are being DDoSed more frequently than banks, in Q1 2021." height="391" src="https://content2.stormwall.network/or/articles/crypto-more-than-banks_w500-1643810493697.jpg" width="500" /></p>

<p>However, the attacks have an opportunistic nature. If the market turns bearish I believe that we&rsquo;ll see a decrease in attack volume in the crypto industry. If the market manages to resume the long-term bullish trend, we might see crypto creeping into those &ldquo;top 5 most DDoSed industries pie charts.&rdquo;</p>

Cryptocurrency Services Are Being DDoSed More Frequently Than Banks in Q1, 2021

<p><img alt="DDoS attacks are raging through the oil and gas industry" src="https://content2.stormwall.network/or/images/articles/oil-and-gas-industry-under-attack-2021.jpg" /></p>

<p>While gaming and entertainment industries are still some of the most popular targets of DDoS actors, some are turning their attention to exploiting the natural resources market. In this article, we drill into how attacks on the fuel industry can have long-lasting effects on a national scale.</p>

While DDoS attacks are costly to all industries, for the oil and gas market day of downtime costs an average of 8 million US dollars.

DDoS Attacks on the Oil and Gas Industry, 2021 | StormWall

<p><em>2 september 2021</em></p>

<h1>DDoS Attacks Are Raging Through the Oil and Gas Industry</h1>

<p>It&rsquo;s not a secret that DDoS attacks are becoming more prominent in 2021. Stormwall&rsquo;s data shows a <a href="https://stormwall.network/blog-analytics-2021-1-kv-report-attacks" target="blank">25.4% surge in DDoS attack frequency compared to Q4 2020</a>. As usual, the most threatened industries are entertainment, telecommunication, online retail, finance, and others. However, there is one seemingly unlikely market, that is becoming the new DDoS hotspot &mdash; the oil and gas industry.</p>

<p>Being fundamental resources, natural fossil fuels have long attracted cybercriminals, and even politically motivated cyberattacks. For example, <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/cyber-attack-on-the-us-major-oil-and-gas-pipeline-what-it-means-for-cybersecurity/" target="blank">an attack on the US gas and oil sector</a> that took place in May 2021 caused Colonial Pipeline, one of the largest American fuel operators, to shut down its entire network &mdash; the sole source of all of the U.S. East Coast&rsquo;s fuel supply. Admittedly, this attack leveraged ransomware rather than DDoS. Still, it became one of the most expensive ransomware attacks on the economy of any country, increasing gas prices across the whole of the US.</p>

<h2>A looming DDoS threat</h2>

<p>Fuel infrastructure is transforming to be increasingly decentralized, incentivizing growth and reducing emissions. As a sector that is actively undergoing digitization, network-reliant systems are often introduced without proper attention to security concerns. An abundance of IoT devices and smart sensors used across pipes and facilities create an easy target for DDoS actors.</p>

<p>Worse yet, the oil and gas industry has limited reporting requirements and while we know that the attacks on the sector &mdash; both by nation-state political actors and for-profit criminals &mdash; are frequent, the exact scale of the threat is hard to assess. Researchers estimate the volume to reach hundreds of thousands of malware attacks per month, but with many instances remaining private, it&rsquo;s hard to tell for sure.</p>

<h2>Huge financial losses&nbsp;</h2>

<p>While DDoS attacks are costly for all industries, this is especially true for the oil and gas market. Responders from one <a href="https://www.csoonline.com/article/2124787/ddos-attacks--network-hacks-rampant-in-oil-and-gas-industry--other-infrastructure-se.html" target="blank">research</a> revealed that one day of downtime costs an average of 8 million US dollars. A powerful denial of service attack can easily take down systems for more than a day. Especially considering that one-third of responders to the same survey conveyed that they view their cybersecurity readiness as &ldquo;inadequate&rdquo; or &ldquo;somewhat adequate&rdquo;.<br />
One-third of responders further added that they view their sector as &ldquo;underprepared&rdquo; to defend against the attacks. The least confident were the responders from Saudi Arabia, with 90% viewing their current state of cybersecurity as lacking.&nbsp;</p>

<p>Often called the most important oil-producing country in the world, Saudi Arabia generated roughly 11.8 million barrels of oil daily in 2019. That is about 11% of the <a href="https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=709&amp;t=6" target="blank">oil produced worldwide</a>. Imagine what would happen if Saudi&rsquo;s oil industry was entirely paralyzed due to DDoS?</p>

<p>A terabit-level attack could potentially halt oil production for weeks, creating a worldwide shift in gas prices, destabilizing certain currencies, and damaging the global economy.</p>

<p><b id="docs-internal-guid-d8cfb3df-7fff-0339-3664-1d8d5a55bb13"><img alt="DDoS attacks are raging through the oil and gas industry" height="488" src="https://content2.stormwall.network/or/images/articles/oil-and-gas-industry-under-attack-2021.jpg" width="624" /></b></p>

<h2>The need for higher cybersecurity standards</h2>

<p>Hopefully, the may 2021 attack on the US oil sector will act as a wake-up call. With many cyberattacks carried out by well-funded, highly equipped criminals with a political goal or as part of a corporate espionage campaign, DDoS will hit the oil and gas industry especially hard. In their current state, many facilities have no chance to mitigate an attack on their own.</p>

<p>However, a responsible approach to cybersecurity will help to mitigate the risks. Businesses in the industry should start by actively participating in sharing their attack data, to help security experts develop countermeasures. Additionally, an online cybersecurity solution, like the one offered by StormWall, can help reliably guard the company&rsquo;s networks &mdash; in the oil and gas industry or not &mdash; &nbsp;against powerful DDoS attacks. &nbsp;Find out more about StormWall DDoS protection.</p>

DDoS Attacks Are Raging Through the Oil and Gas Industry

<p><img alt="How a DDoS attack can damage your website." src="https://content2.stormwall.network/or/articles/ddos-danger-for-site_w950-1643816942752.jpg" /></p>

<p>Brining your website down is the most obvious, but there are subtler ways in which DDoS attacks can harm your business. In this article, we&rsquo;re looking at the top 5 ways how DDoS can damage your online resource.</p>

There are a few options that can cause trouble because of DDoS attack: website downtime, increased vulnerability to hacking, SEO penalties, etc.

Damage from DDoS Attacks for Websites | StormWall

<p><em>9 september 2021</em></p>

<h1>How a DDoS Attack Can Damage Your Website</h1>

<p>In previous articles, we&rsquo;ve talked about the various types of DDoS protection and who&rsquo;s in the most danger of becoming an attack victim. But just how does a Denial of Service attack impact your online business? Here are some of the most notable ways:</p>

<ul>
	<li>Website downtime;</li>
	<li>Increased vulnerability to hacking;</li>
	<li>SEO penalties;</li>
	<li>Damaged reputation;</li>
	<li>Incorrect functioning of certain systems.</li>
</ul>

<p><img alt="How a DDoS attack can damage your website." src="https://content2.stormwall.network/or/articles/ddos-danger-for-site_w950-1643816942752.jpg" /></p>

<h2>Website downtime</h2>

<p>By overloading the server&rsquo;s CPU, RAM, and even network throughput, DDoS renders a website unavailable to customers and backend users alike. That means that if you&rsquo;re running an online store, your visitors won&rsquo;t be able to make a purchase. Actually, they won&rsquo;t even be able to load the homepage. This leads to reputational risks, loss of customer loyalty, and loss of revenue. Imagine how many of those customers will turn to competitors, especially if their request is time-sensitive. In fact, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/a-lot/505025/" target="blank">an hour of downtime costed up to $20,000</a> to one-third of affected businesses interviewed in one research.</p>

<h2>Increased vulnerability to hacking</h2>

<p>A DDoS attack can shut down some of the security systems of your website, creating additional vulnerabilities. For example, hackers may find it easier to access your resource via a back door, while the website is paralized by a network flood. What&rsquo;s more, some DDoS actors use the attacks as a diversion, distracting your security staff from potentially more dangerous malware strikes, aimed at stealing sensitive information or gaining access to your system.</p>

<h2>SEO penalties</h2>

<p>Overloaded websites return 502 bad gateway errors when users try visiting them. If a website is unavailable for long enough, there&rsquo;s a high chance that Google will crawl the website while it&rsquo;s down and decrease it&rsquo;s SEO ranking. What&rsquo;s more, if the website remains down longer than a couple of days, there&rsquo;s a chance that when it comes back online, the internal linking structure will be lost for Google indexing, messing up the website&rsquo;s presentation in search results. &nbsp;</p>

<h2>Risks to reputation</h2>

<p>According to a poll of 5,000 businesses, 39% of owners fear losing clients to competitors more than they fear direct revenue loss or spending additional mitigation costs. Indeed, if the website stays down long enough, chances are that even loyal customers will start looking for alternatives in the market. While for some, websites aren&rsquo;t a direct sales tool, having a resource unavailable is still a direct risk to reputation. Imagine a shop that doesn&rsquo;t have a store-front, only letting customers in through the backdoor. What shady business may be going in there, right?</p>

<h2>Incorrect functioning of certain systems</h2>

<p>This is a rarer one, but did you know that DDoS attacks can be used to cheat the system? Imagine running a car bids marketplace that has a leaderboard of most visited ads, located at a prime spot on the homepage. Normally, the ad with the most visits would reflect the hottest, most wanted car and it would make sense to have it highlighted, for the benefit of both the seller and all potential buyers. Yet, a system like this can be easily cheated using DDoS. Since every DDoS attack consists of sending &ldquo;fake&rdquo; visitors, AKA bot traffic to a website, if done carefully, it can ramp up the visit counter on a particular page without bringing the whole website down. A smart way to get some free advertising on our imaginary car bidding website. So, if your website has functionality that leverages page visits, filtering out bots is essential to ensuring that it runs properly and fairly.</p>

<p>As you can see, a DDoS attack can inflict tremendous damage to any website, causing victims to lose money, reputation, SEO ranking and even increasing the chance you will get hacked. With experts universally agreeing that the strength and quantity of DDoS attacks will keep increasing in 2021, thinking about protection now is paramount. Thankfully, trusted security providers such as StormWall can take care of your security needs for you, with online DDoS protection. Consider visiting the <a href="https://stormwall.network/website-protection" target="blank"> website protection</a> page to learn more about our solutions.</p>

Cryptocurrency Services Are Being DDoSed More Frequently Than Banks in Q1, 2021

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