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DISTRIBUTED Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in Bahrain accounted for 7 per cent of all malicious traffic in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) during the third quarter of 2025, according to a new report by cybersecurity provider StormWall.
The findings show a steady climb for the kingdom, which saw its share of regional attack traffic rise from 5pc in the second quarter. This increase comes amid a broader regional surge, with total DDoS incidents in Mena jumping 163pc year-on-year.
Analysts highlight a significant shift in the motivations behind these attacks. While the second quarter was dominated by politically motivated ‘hacktivism’ due to regional tensions, the third quarter saw a pivot toward financial extortion. For-profit hackers and ransom-seekers were responsible for 68pc of malicious traffic in Q3, a complete reversal from the previous quarter when hacktivists controlled 73pc of the volume.
This change in tactics has directly impacted target selection, with attackers focusing on sectors where downtime causes immediate revenue loss. Retail emerged as the most targeted industry in the region at 22pc, followed by finance at 19pc and telecommunications at 17pc. The gaming sector also saw a massive spike, with its share of attacks nearly tripling over the quarter to 14pc.
Regionally, Saudi Arabia remained the most targeted country at 22pc, while Qatar saw the largest growth, jumping from 9pc to 17pc of all regional attacks. In contrast, attacks targeting Israel and Iran decreased as geopolitical tensions cooled.
The report also warns of the increasing technical scale of these threats. Botnet-driven activity rose 182pc year-on-year, with the average botnet size in Mena expanding to approximately 215,000 compromised devices. Furthermore, “probing attacks” – used by hackers to test network defences before launching full-scale strikes – increased threefold compared to last year.
Ramil Khantimirov, chief executive officer and founder of StormWall, noted that the shift toward profit-driven attacks makes high-revenue industries particularly vulnerable.
He explained that in sectors like retail and gaming, even brief service disruptions can drive users to switch to better-protected competitors. The largest single attack recorded during the period reached 1.3 Tbit/s, targeting an e-commerce platform in the UAE.
The report concludes that businesses in high-revenue sectors must prioritise more robust mitigation strategies to counter increasingly sophisticated and powerful botnet attacks.
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