Cloud services provider Cloudflare released its report on distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks for the first quarter of 2023, revealing several insights and trends in DDoS attacks.

In terms of countries, Israel was the most targeted country worldwide, followed closely by the USA. Finland was the largest source of HTTP DDoS attacks regarding the percentage of attack traffic. It was also the main target of network-layer DDoS attacks. Regarding HTTP DDoS attacks, Slovenia and Georgia were the top countries in the percentage of attack traffic compared to all traffic to a given country. Nearly 18% of all network-layer DDoS attack traffic originated from China. With a 17% share, Singapore was in second place.

According to the report, 16% of respondents reported a ransom DDoS attack in Q1, the same as the previous quarter but a 60% increase compared to the same period last year. Non-profit organisations and broadcast media were among the most targeted industries.

The report also shows that large volumetric DDoS attacks -those greater than 100Gbps -increased by 6% quarter-on-quarter. The most popular vector was Domain Name System (DNS) based attacks.