One thing to consider about the Q1 2018 data is that it’s only one quarter in comparison to the annual averages of 2016 and 2017, and that Q1 typically receives the least number of attacks of any quarter. If attacks against North America decline in Q2, as they have done the past 2 years, the trend of North America declining in overall percentage of attacks received will continue to drop. Attacks against EMEA entities increased in Q2 in 2016 and 2017, indicating there is a good chance EMEA’s percentage of the total will continue to rise, potentially surpassing North American targets for the first time.

Attacks by Target Industry

Web hosting providers and financial organizations have always been top DDoS attack targets, and that trend continued in 2017. Why? Because those two industries directly translate downtime into dollars lost. Therefore, blackmail DDoS attacks are a very lucrative attack type as paying the ransom is an effective way to stop the pain.

The gap between the traditional top targets and other various industries including technology providers, ISP’s, online gaming, and business service providers is steadily closing. Every year we continue to see a broader scope of DDoS targets with the growth in DDoS-for-hire services at extremely affordable rates, and availability of DDoS tools to the common script kiddie.