9TH NOV 2023
Cybersecurity experts remain vigilant, as three major firms got hit by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks this week. The discovery of OpenAI, Cloudflare and Sberbank DDoS attacks point to the use of new, sophisticated and increasingly effective tools to overwhelm IT infrastructure.
These attacks come against a backdrop of increasing political and economic tensions worldwide.
We take a look at what made headlines this time.
One of the most extensive networks on the internet, unified web services provider Cloudflare has confirmed that it was the target of a DDoS attack earlier today.
The DDoS attack made it impossible to access www.cloudflare.com. The company clarified that no other products or services were impacted.
A Cloudflare spokesperson had this to say about the current outage:
Threat group Anonymous Sudan has claimed responsibility for attacking Cloudflare’s website in a Telegram message. The group stated that their attack lasted for one hour.
During the attack, visitors were greeted by “We’re sorry” Google errors while on Cloudflare. The design of the Google logo on this page doesn’t match its existing logo, prompting Cloudflare’s Head of Organic Social Ryan Knight’s observation that it looks “a little off.”
In a similar incident, popular generative AI tool ChatGPT also faced “periodic outages” due to DDoS attacks on Nov 8, 2023. The attacks targeted its API and services for 24 hours.
Parent company OpenAI stated that the outages indicated a DDoS attack based on an abnormal traffic pattern.
The denial of service attack came after OpenAI faced another major outage on Wednesday that affected its AI image-generation tool Dall-E.
While OpenAI has yet to reveal who was behind these attacks, threat group Anonymous Sudan has assumed responsibility for the outage on their Telegram channel.
The group confirmed using the SkyNet botnet, which significantly strains the target server and network.
Sberbank, a majority state-owned banking and financial services provider, was hit by a powerful DDoS attack. A press release by the firm confirmed that the attacks happened two weeks ago.
The bank is the largest financial institution in Russia, holding a third of all assets in the country.
Russian news agency Interfax reports that Sberbank’s systems were choked with one million requests per second. For context, this attack was roughly four times bigger than the biggest DDoS attack it had faced previously.
The head of Sberbank had this to say about the attackers:
