Large-scale, live broadcasts of events such as film premieres, concerts, professional sporting competitions, and online gaming events are more commonplace than ever. Even before the pandemic forced many in-person events to go virtual, live events were big business, enabling audience interaction and generating $ millions. As with any Internet service, online events are vulnerable to cyberattacks. Recently, during the hugely popular Eurovision Song Contest, threat actors launched a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Eurovision’s network infrastructure in an attempt to disrupt online voting. Fortunately, the attack was successfully thwarted.
You might wonder why a song contest would be targeted by a cybercriminal group. The unfortunate reality is that any organization can be the victim of a DDoS attack, but some are more likely to be targeted, depending on their line of business or political viewpoints. Regarding political hacktivism, a consortium of international Government cybersecurity forces recently warned that Russia and its sympathizers could launch DDoS attacks on organizations that are perceived as allies of Ukraine. Many such attacks have been reported already in the past few months of the conflict; in most cases it is unknown whether they were instigated by nation-states, political hacktivists, lone-wolf actors, or rogue criminal groups.
Authorities suspect the attack on Eurovision was launched by the Killnet Group, which is linked to Russia, and seems to view the Italian government as an opponent. According to IT Pro, “Days before the Eurovision Song Contest, Italian authorities reported, via ANSA, that the same Killnet hackers had targeted the websites of the Italian National Health Institute and Automobile Club d’Italia, a national drivers’ association.”
Corero has a track record of successfully mitigating attempted DDoS attacks on networks as they host live events. One such customer is OneQode, an optimised international carrier network and high-performance cloud platform that works primarily with gaming industry customers to deliver high-fidelity, low-latency multiplayer experiences for 1.45 billion gamers across 3 continents in the Asia Pacific region. In 2021 OneQode hosted the first-ever genuinely cross-regional Asia-Pacific CS:GO tournament, where gamers from as far afield as Mongolia and Australia were able to compete online with under 100 milliseconds of latency. Unbeknown to all players, over the course of 5 days, OneQode’s deployment of the Corero SmartWall® solution mitigated 856 separate DDoS attacks, including one that would usually be a game-ending, wipe-out attack. However, with Corero DDoS protection in place, the tournament continued uninterrupted.
Why does it matter?
DDoS attacks are common, but most of the time they are short in duration, and sub-saturating in volume. This means the vast majority of attacks are not big enough to gain public attention. But, when a DDoS attack successfully ruins a live event, it’s the cybercriminals who win, and the targeted victim can lose customer trust, brand reputation and revenue; that’s a high price to pay. The bottom line is that broadcast media and infrastructure providers need always-on, automated, real-time DDoS protection to ensure that live events are delivered without downtime or interruption.
For over a decade, Corero has been providing state-of-the-art, highly-effective, real-time automatic DDoS protection solutions for enterprise, hosting and service provider customers around the world. Our SmartWall® DDoS mitigation solutions protect on-premise, cloud, virtual and hybrid environments. For more on Corero’s diverse deployment models, click here. If you’d like to learn more, please contact us.