Subscribe to receive notifications of new posts:

Hackers love the holidays

2012-12-21

1 min read

This article was written by John Graham-Cumming on the CloudFlare team and originally published by VentureBeat. We're republishing it here.


Looking at the latest DDoS attack statistics from CloudFlare's network, it seems that hackers love the holidays.

Zooming in on November and December 2012 it's not hard to spot when Thanksgiving 2012 happened. Fully 1/5 of the attacks that CloudFlare saw in November and December (so far) happened on the Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving:

Hackers love the
holidays

In the past we've seen drops in DDoS attacks on some holidays because the home and office machines used as bots in those attacks have been turned off. For example, this year we noticed a large drop in attack activity on Earth Day (when people are encouraged to switch off their machines to save the planet). But this year's Thanksgiving attack statistics indicate that plenty of hacked machines were online through the holiday.

But what does this tell us about the coming Christmas holiday period? To answer that we can look back to December 2011. CloudFlare has DDoS data for December 11, 2011 to January 1, 2012 which shows two distinct peaks of attack activity: one just before Christmas and one just after.

Hackers love the
holidays

So, if 2011 is a guide DDoS attackers will be taking a few days off over Christmas, but will be keeping the pressure on just before and immediately after. That's probably not a surprise as some fo the attackers will be attempting to disrupt businesses during critical periods for pre- and post-Christmas sales.

Even though there's a Christmas lull, that doesn't mean that CloudFlare staff will be letting down their guard, however. We'll be here working to ensure that whenever attacks arise and from whereever we're ready to absorb and deflect them.

Cloudflare's connectivity cloud protects entire corporate networks, helps customers build Internet-scale applications efficiently, accelerates any website or Internet application, wards off DDoS attacks, keeps hackers at bay, and can help you on your journey to Zero Trust.

Visit 1.1.1.1 from any device to get started with our free app that makes your Internet faster and safer.

To learn more about our mission to help build a better Internet, start here. If you're looking for a new career direction, check out our open positions.
HolidaysAttacksDDoSReliability

Follow on X

Cloudflare|@cloudflare

Related posts

November 06, 2024 8:00 AM

Exploring Internet traffic shifts and cyber attacks during the 2024 US election

Election Day 2024 in the US saw a surge in cyber activity. Cloudflare blocked several DDoS attacks on political and election sites, ensuring no impact. In this post, we analyze these attacks, as well Internet traffic increases across the US and other key trends....

October 09, 2024 1:00 PM

Improving platform resilience at Cloudflare through automation

We realized that we need a way to automatically heal our platform from an operations perspective, and designed and built a workflow orchestration platform to provide these self-healing capabilities across our global network. We explore how this has helped us to reduce the impact on our customers due to operational issues, and the rich variety of similar problems it has empowered us to solve....