HOIC, HULK, LOIC, and Slowloris are all well documented, allowing anyone the ability to launch a denial-of-service attack without any prior knowledge or experience. Denial-of-Service: The People’s Digital Weapon of Choice This includes not only the return of Anonymous to the main stage with renewed operations under the battle tag, OpRussia, but also new hacktivist campaigns targeting Israel from threat group DragonForce Malaysia. This growth is mainly attributed to the ongoing conflict in Eastern Europe, which has seen a large influx of hacktivism on both Russian and Ukrainian sides. ![]() It’s greater than the last two years of HOIC, HULK, LOIC and Slowloris events combined. While these denial-of-service tools are trending down coming out of Q2 2022, the spike in Q1 is very noticeable. Along with the renewed growth in hacktivism this year, we have also seen a tremendous spike in the use of decade-old denial-of-service tools in lockstep (see figure 2).įigure 2: HOIC, LOIC, HULK, Slowloris DoS Events (2020-2022) We are also now seeing an increase in activity in Asia related to geo-political escalations in Taiwan. ![]() This year we have already seen notable cyber conflicts arise in Eastern Europe due to Russia invading Ukraine and the Middle East due to the escalating tit-for-tat war. Since the first quarter of 2022, there has been a significant increase in hacktivism worldwide. This decline in use is primarily attributed to the collapse of Anonymous following the Trump/Clinton election battle in 2016 and hacktivists’ inability to grasp more advanced Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP) as the threat landscape evolved into a more organized and for-profit model. They began focusing on building their own IoT botnets capable of launching much more powerful DDoS attacks.įigure 1: HOIC, LOIC, HULK, Slowloris DoS Events (2020/2021)īy the decade’s end, simple denial-of-service tools barely impacted the threat landscape, averaging less than a few hundred monthly events (see figure 1). But after the publication of BASHLITE’s source code in 2015 and Mirai’s source code in 2016, threat actors abandoned these old tools. When leveraged by a group in a coordinated attack like an Anonymous operation, the threat actors could launch powerful distributed denial-of-services (DDoS) attacks, resulting in more successful campaigns. In the decade’s first half, simple denial-of-service tools, such as HOIC, HULK, LOIC, and Slowloris, were the go-to choices for hackers and hacktivists worldwide. Fast forward a year later, and not only have hacktivists returned to the threat landscape in a significant way, but they have also brought out the old playbook. I went on to say that Anonymous, the largest user group of those tools, was no longer the threat it used to be. ![]() At the time, I had concluded that while the tools were still relevant, they were not as popular or effective as they used to be due to the evolution of the threat landscape and the advancements in mitigation technology. In June 2021, I wrote a blog questioning if decade-old denial-of-service tools were still relevant.
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