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Businesses across the Gulf face a critical surge in sophisticated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks following the submarine cable cuts in the Red Sea last month, cybersecurity firm StormWall has warned.
According to experts, a DDoS attack is a cyberattack designed to crash a website or online service by overwhelming it with a massive flood of bogus Internet traffic. The severing of the SMW4 and IMEWE cables near Jeddah, which slashed the region’s Internet capacity by 25 per cent, has created a critical double vulnerability.
First, the reduced bandwidth makes the region highly susceptible to massive DDoS campaigns, as hackers can now more easily overwhelm major targets like telecom providers and data centres, causing widespread business disruption.
Second, the international damage is compounded by protection failure, where many global cybersecurity providers cannot deliver sufficient DDoS protection because they are experiencing severe latency and packet loss to their European scrubbing servers.
StormWall chief executive Ramil Khantimirov commented: “To be resilient, your resources and your DDoS protection must be local.” He noted that clients using in-region protection have avoided service failures.
Hackers are exploiting this vulnerability with advanced multi-vector attacks, combining volumetric floods with Layer 7 HTTP/HTTPS attacks. A notable 75-80pc of post-cut attacks lasted under 15 minutes, likely serving as probes to identify weak resources.
Sectors most exposed to the financial damage of DDoS, which can cost businesses up to $9,000 per minute, are facing significant risks. These include telecom providers, which risk service quality crashes; government portals, which face a loss of public confidence; banks, which are vulnerable to potential payment failures and reputational harm; online retailers, which can suffer revenue loss and supply chain issues; and entertainment platforms, which face subscription cancellations.
Mr Khantimirov advised that the fastest way to secure systems is to use a DDoS protection provider with active scrubbing centres in the Mena region. This ensures traffic is filtered locally, bypassing the congested international routes and guaranteeing protection against both heightened attacks and cable-damage accessibility issues.
avinash@gdnmedia.bh
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