Cloudflare Reveals Attempts to Down Israeli Missile Alert Websites
The website security company identified DDoS attacks 12 minutes after Hamas began its multi-front attack in the early hours of October 7th
The heinous Hamas surprise attack of October 7th, which included a massacre in southern Israeli communities and thousands of rockets launched from Gaza at Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and other heavily populated areas, was also accompanied by cyber attacks.
According to website security company Cloudflare, approximately twelve minutes after the attack began (at 06:30 a.m.), its systems automatically detected and mitigated DDoS attacks that targeted websites that provided critical information and alerts to civilians on rocket attacks.
In a new blog post, Cloudflare’s Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco write that the initial attack peaked at 100k requests per second and lasted ten minutes. Forty-five minutes later, a second much larger attack struck and peaked at 1M rps. It lasted six minutes. Additional smaller DDoS attacks continued hitting the websites in the next hours.
Multiple Israeli websites and mobile apps have become targets of various pro-Palestinian hacktivist groups since October 7th. Cloudflare says that media websites account for 56% of DDoS attacks – similar to the trends seen when Russia attacked Ukraine.
The second most targeted industry in Israel was the computer software industry, accounting for nearly 34% of all DDoS attacks. In third place came the financial service and banking sector, followed by government administration websites.
However, on the day of the Hamas attack, the percentage of DDoS attack traffic increased. Nearly 1 out of every 100 requests towards Israeli websites using Cloudflare were part of an HTTP DDoS attack. That figure quadrupled on October 8.
Cloudflare revealed that since October 1st, 2023, it automatically detected and mitigated over 5 billion HTTP requests that were part of DDoS attacks. On October 7th, the percentage of DDoS attack traffic increased. Nearly 1 out of every 100 requests towards Israeli websites using Cloudflare were part of an HTTP DDoS attack. That figure quadrupled on October 8.