Critical infrastructure, also known as operational technology (OT) has been an increasingly urgent focus of the security industry as attacks against power plants, water systems, and other essential systems continue to rise. The national cybersecurity agencies of nine countries — Australia, the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, and South Korea — recently endorsed new guidelines that urge organizations managing OT networks to address their threat levels.

Increased hacktivist activities, some of them originating in Russia, have been primarily responsible for a 43% increase in application layer attacks during the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, according to Netscout’s telemetry data. During the first half of 2024, the company’s ASERT team also recorded a 30% rise in volumetric attacks that aim to saturate the victim’s network resources, with an average of around 41,000 DDoS attacks every day. These attacks used both amplification and reflection techniques as well as direct-path traffic from large botnets.

Application layer attacks usually target application communication protocols, most commonly HTTP/S in the case of web applications. The goal is to send a very large number of GET or POST HTTP requests to overwhelm the web server’s ability to respond to legitimate requests. These are also known as HTTP floods and are usually expressed in requests per second (rpps).