Cybersecurity defenders face increasing threats from organizations in the form of bot-based credential abuse targeting the hospitality industry and advanced distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, according to the summer 2018 State of the Internet/Security: Web Attack report released by Akamai Technologies, Inc.

The use of bots to abuse stolen credentials continues to be a major risk for Internet-driven businesses, but data from this report reveals that the hospitality industry experiences many more credential abuse attacks than other sectors.

Geographic analysis of attack traffic origination reveals that Russia, China and Indonesia were major sources of credential abuse for the travel industry during the period covered by the report, directing about half of their credential abuse activity at hotels, cruise lines, airlines, and travel sites. Attack traffic origination against the hospitality and travel industry from China and Russia combined was three times the amount of attacks originating in the US.

While simple volumetric DDoS attacks continued to be the most common method used to attack organizations globally, other techniques have continued to appear. For this edition of the report, Akamai researchers identified and tracked advanced techniques that show the influence of intelligent, adaptive enemies who change tactics to overcome the defences in their way.