Welcome to the third DDoS threat report of 2023. DDoS attacks, or distributed denial-of-service attacks, are a type of cyber attack that aims to disrupt websites (and other types of Internet properties) to make them unavailable for legitimate users by overwhelming them with more traffic than they can handle — similar to a driver stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the grocery store.
In recent years, there has been a major ongoing trend toward more digital infrastructure and an increased dependence on technology across a wide variety of sectors. In the property industry, this has manifested heavily in the growth of the property technology (PropTech) market. These developments have had a serious impact on the sector, enabling advances that both improve existing processes and add new features to real estate transactions.
The October 2023 Okta breach is the latest example in a long line of third-party identity attacks. Based on reports to date, it seems that the attack on Okta’s support case management system enabled a threat actor to launch downstream attacks into other companies. So far, 1Password, BeyondTrust and Cloudflare have publicly confirmed they were targeted. Such attacks don’t discriminate and pointing fingers is unproductive.
An exploit kit is a toolkit that cybercriminals use to attack the security vulnerabilities of a system or device to distribute malware. An exploit is a bit of code that takes advantage of security vulnerabilities found within software and hardware. Cybercriminals collect these bits of code and compile them into a kit that can target multiple security vulnerabilities at once, and secretly install malware on devices.