Internet traffic typically mirrors human behavior, with significant fluctuations during large political events. This comes during a time when the United States is in election mode, as political campaigns are in full swing and candidates for various offices, primaries and caucuses make their case to voters and debates are being held. This week, the Republican National Convention was hosted in Milwaukee, Wisconsin from July 15 to 18, 2024. We examined traffic shifts and cyberattacks since June 2024 to see how these events have impacted the Internet.
Attacks on political related websites
Cyberattacks are a constant threat, and aren't necessarily driven by elections. With that said, notable trends can often be observed, and we’ve seen before how specific geopolitical events can trigger online attacks. For example, we saw cyberattacks at the start of the war in Ukraine to more recently in the Netherlands, when the June 2024 European elections coincided with cyberattacks on Dutch political-related websites that lasted two days — June 5th and 6th. The main DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service attack) attack on June 5, the day before the Dutch election, reached 73,000 requests per second (rps).
Shifting our focus to the United States in particular, in the weeks since April 2024, we’ve seen several DDoS attacks targeting both federal and state government and political-related websites in the United States. In recent days Cloudflare has also blocked DDoS attacks targeting two political-related websites.
One of those is related to a political campaign, represented by the yellow line on the chart below. The first spike was a DDoS attack on July 2, 2024, peaking at 56,000 rps and lasting around 10 minutes. The same political-related site was attacked later on July 14, with a 34,000 rps peak, lasting four minutes.
The other political-related site under attack, in green on the previous chart, is a think tank website that does policy advocacy related to presidential politics. It was already attacked before, around the time of the Biden vs Trump debate, as we’ve published at the time in a related blog post. The main attack was on July 11, with a 137,000 rps peak, lasting a few minutes, and was repeated, with slightly lower intensity, a few hours later on July 12.
As we’ve seen in our recent DDoS report, the vast majority of DDoS attacks are short. This emphasizes the need for automated, in-line detection and mitigation systems. Ten minutes are hardly enough time for a human to respond to an alert, analyze the traffic, and apply manual mitigations.
Trump assassination attempt impact
The attempted assassination of former President Trump at a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania precipitated an increase in Internet traffic within the United States, particularly to news-related media outlets. As news broke of shots fired at a Trump rally, injuring the former president, Internet traffic in the United States (in bytes) increased around 22:30 - 23:00 UTC (18:30-19:00 EST) by 10% to 12%.
HTTP requests in the United States saw up to an 8% increase on July 13th compared to the previous week.
At the same time, DNS traffic to TV news sites, via our 1.1.1.1 resolver, surged by as much as 215%, and to general news sites by 141%.
Republican National Convention
The Republican National Convention is an important political event as delegates of the United States Republican Party choose the party's nominees for president and vice president in the 2024 United States presidential election. Over the four-day event, convention delegates formally nominate the party’s presidential and vice presidential candidates and adopt the party's platform, which outlines its policies and positions on various issues. The convention features speeches from prominent party members, including the nominees, party leaders, and other influential figures.
This year’s convention was held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During this time, we didn’t identify any noticeable traffic spikes from Milwaukee or from Wisconsin in general.
Compared to the previous week, there was an increase in DNS traffic to Republican political party and fundraising websites. On July 18th, the last day of the convention, we saw two considerable increases in hourly traffic compared to a week prior. The first at 14:00 EDT, an increase of 268% in traffic to these sites. The second, at 23:00 EDT with another increase at 266%. The daily aggregation on this day was an increase of 90.48% compared to daily traffic aggregations in the previous week.
For DNS traffic during the convention for TV news channels, we see steady traffic numbers with the highest peaking days before the convention on July 14, then during the late hours of July 15th.
For political news websites covering the RNC, traffic numbers tend to decrease slightly as the event progresses.
We identified an attack against a think-tank based in Washington D.C. that does policy advocacy related to presidential politics. The attack itself lasted around 3 minutes, from July 18th 13:18 to 13:22 exclusive (EDT) with a total of 3.12 million DDoS requests mitigated. The attack peaked at around 30.33k rps.
We see that major political events may not always cause significant shifts in Internet traffic. Our data indicates increases in traffic primarily to news and media organizations from July 13th onward. When it comes to cyber attacks, a majority of activity we see targets political campaigns and policy organizations.
If you want to follow more trends and insights about the Internet and elections in particular, you can check Cloudflare Radar, and more specifically our new 2024 Elections Insights report, which will be updated as elections take place throughout the year.