FS-ISAC report: DDoS attacks targeting banks and other financial firms had increased 22% YoY by November 2022, particularly in Europe, where they rose 73% YoY
Context & Ripple Effects
Financial-sector DDoS volume is climbing again: FS-ISAC counted a 22% year-over-year rise in attacks on banks and other financial firms by November 2022, with Europe bearing the sharpest increase at 73% YoY. The sector joins gaming, which Akamai found absorbed 37% of all DDoS attacks during May 2021-April 2022 as web application attacks on gaming jumped 167%.
The escalation is not new — Verisign recorded an 85% quarterly jump back in Q4 2015 — but the concentration in European financial targets marks this report as the standout data point.
First-order effects
- Banks and financial firms — especially European ones facing the 73% surge — must absorb more frequent availability attacks on customer-facing services, raising the operational bar just to stay online.
- Security teams' mitigation budgets and incident-response load shift toward volumetric defense, since DDoS pressure lands directly on uptime rather than data theft.
Second-order effects
- Vendors selling DDoS scrubbing and traffic-management capacity see demand pull from the hardest-hit region, as European institutions become the reference case for buying more protection.
- Sector targeting appears to rotate — gaming's 37% share of attacks in the prior Akamai data shows attackers follow where disruption bites — so adjacent financial-adjacent services (payments, trading infrastructure) face elevated risk as defenses elsewhere harden.
Third-order effects
- If the trajectory holds, DDoS cements itself as a persistent instrument of geopolitical friction rather than episodic criminal extortion — the path Netscout later described when it counted attacks growing from 13M+ in 2023 to almost 17M in 2024 (its full-year tally).
- Regulatory attention to financial-sector operational resilience is likely to treat sustained DDoS volume as a systemic availability risk, pushing banks to justify resilience spending beyond perimeter security.
The trend: DDoS attack volume keeps compounding across sectors — gaming first, then finance, then conflict zones overall — with European financial firms the current focal point.