Akamai Technologies, a cloud company that powers and protects life online, has released a new State of the Internet report that explores existing and emerging cyberattacks against the financial services industry.
The new report, The High Stakes of Innovation: Attack Trends in Financial Services, finds that financial services are the third-most attacked vector in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, with approximately 1 billion web application and API attacks, which represents a significant 119% year-over-year increase when comparing Q2 2022 with Q2 2023.
In EMEA, insurance is by far the most attacked sub-vertical of financial services with 54.5% of all web attacks, which represents a 68% increase year over year. Insurance companies hold a huge amount of personally identifiable information, which makes them an attractive target for cybercriminals in contrast with other financial services organisations that hold mostly financial data.
The report also finds that as a region, EMEA experienced the most DDoS attack events (63.5% of attacks worldwide), which is nearly double the number in North America, the next top region (32.6%). The UK tops the list in EMEA at 29.2% of DDoS attack events, followed by Germany at 15.1%. Akamai surmises that the attacks on the European banks that are allies of Ukraine are financially and politically motivated by Russia’s continued war in Ukraine and are the primary reason for the increase in attack events in EMEA.
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