In recent news, the number of cyber incidents in the Czech Republic has decreased. According to the National Office for Cyber and Information Security (NÚKIB), the count of these incidents in November was below average. This comes after three months of above-average cyber incident rates. All ten reported incidents were also classified as less significant.
This trend is fresh air in cybersecurity, where instances of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are expected. These attacks follow the same scenario, where hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of computers access a particular server simultaneously. The server typically cannot handle the high requests, causing it to crash. For everyday users, the targeted website appears unavailable.
Despite declining Czech cyber incidents, cybersecurity experts warn that DDoS attacks are becoming more sophisticated and intense globally. The cybersecurity company ComSource has warned that these attacks are now capable of causing far more significant damage. Previously, DDoS attacks meant brute force, overloading the entire infrastructure. However, the trend is gradually changing towards more quality-focused attacks.
Cybersecurity expert Jaroslav Cihelka, co-owner of ComSource, noted that the overall numbers of DDoS attacks are stagnating or even decreasing, mainly because these cyber raids are not significant in volume. “It’s not that DDoS attacks are disappearing. Unfortunately, it’s just the opposite. Attackers are also using several types of attacks simultaneously,” remarked Cihelka.
The increased proportion of attacks on the so-called application layer is also causing concern among security experts. This allows attackers to effectively increase the impact of attacks and flood service-operating servers more efficiently, even with a lower intensity of network traffic.
Despite the global trends, the situation in the Czech Republic in November was favorable. “This year, it is only the second month when only less significant cyber incidents were registered,” the office stated. Most registered November cyber incidents were from the availability category, including DDoS attacks and some operational outages. These are most commonly used in the cyberwar parallel to the conflict in Ukraine, as repeatedly warned by NÚKIB.