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As we celebrate the eighth anniversary of Project Galileo, we want to provide a view into the type of cyber attacks experienced by organizations protected under the project. In a year full of new challenges for so many, we hope that analysis of attacks against these vulnerable groups provides researchers, civil society, and targeted organizations with insight into how to better protect those working in these spaces.

For this blog, we want to focus on attacks we have seen against organizations in Ukraine, including significant growth in DDoS attack activity after the start of the conflict. Within the related Radar dashboard, we do a deep dive into attack trends against Project Galileo participants in a range of areas including human rights, journalism, and community led non-profits.

To read the whole report, visit the Project Galileo 8th anniversary Radar Dashboard.

Understanding the Data

• For this dashboard, we analyzed data from July 1, 2021 to May 5, 2022 from 1,900 organizations from around the world that are protected under the project.
• For DDoS attacks, we classify this as traffic that we have determined is part of a Layer 7 (application layer) DDoS attack. Such attacks are often malicious floods of requests designed to overwhelm a site with the intention of knocking it offline. We block the requests associated with the attack, ensuring that legitimate requests reach the site, and that it stays online.
• For traffic mitigated by the web application firewall, this is traffic that was determined to be malicious and was blocked by Cloudflare’s firewall. We provide free Business level services under Project Galileo, and our WAF is one of the valuable tools used to mitigate attempts to exploit vulnerabilities intended to gain unauthorized access to an organization's online application.
• For graphs that represent changes in traffic or domains under Project Galileo, we are using the average daily traffic (number of requests) of the first two weeks of July 2021 as the baseline.

Highlights of past year

• We continue to see cyberattack activity increase, with nearly 18 billion attacks between July 2021 and May 2022. This is an average of nearly 57.9 million cyberattacks per day over the last nine months, an increase of nearly 10% over last year.
• Mitigated DDoS traffic targeting organizations in Ukraine reached as much as 90% of total traffic during one significant attack in April.
• After the war in Ukraine started, applications to the project increased by 177% in March 2022.
• Journalism and media organizations in Europe and the Americas saw traffic grow ~150% over the last year.
• We see a range of unsophisticated cyberattacks against organizations that work in human rights and journalism. Up to 40% of WAF mitigated requests were classified as HTTP Anomalies, the largest of any WAF rule type, a type of attack that can be damaging to unprotected organizations but is automatically blocked by Cloudflare.
• From July 2021 to May 2022, organizations based in Europe consistently accounted for half to two-thirds of request traffic out of all the regions covered under the project.

Global Coverage of Project Galileo

Protecting organizations in Ukraine

As the war started in Ukraine, we saw an increase in applications for participation in Project Galileo from organizations looking for our assistance. Many came in while under DDoS attack, but we also saw sites subject to large influxes of traffic from people on the ground in Ukraine attempting to access information due to the ongoing Russian invasion. While traffic from organizations in Ukraine was largely flat before the start of the war, since that time, traffic increases primarily have been driven by organizations that work in journalism and media.

Ahead of the war, organizations that work in community building/social welfare, such as those who provide direct assistance to refugees, or provide donation platforms to support those in Ukraine were responsible for what little traffic that was mitigated by the web application firewall (WAF). However, after the war began, journalism organizations saw the most WAF-mitigated traffic, with frequent spikes, including one on March 13 representing 69% of traffic. During this period of increased WAF-mitigated requests that started in late February, the majority of the attacks were classified as SQLi. WAF mitigated traffic for human rights organizations increased in mid-March, growing to between 5-10% of traffic.

Mitigated DDoS traffic for organizations in Ukraine was concentrated in the mid-March to May timeframe, with rapid growth in the percentage of traffic it represents. The first spikes were in the 20% range, but rapidly grew before receding, including an attack on April 19 that accounted for over 90% of traffic that day.

Since the start of the war, growth in traffic from protected organizations has varied across the categories. Traffic among Health organizations increased by 20-30x over baseline between late March and later April. Setting aside attack spikes, traffic from Journalism organizations was generally up 3-4x over baseline. Growth in the other categories was generally below 3x.

For traffic mitigated by the web application firewall (WAF), the most frequently applied rule was HTTP Anomaly, associated with 92% of requests. Requests for Web content (HTTP requests) have an expected structure, set of headers, and related values. Some attackers will send malformed requests, including anomalies like missing headers, unsupported request methods, using non-standard ports, or invalid character encoding. These requests are classified as "HTTP anomalies". These anomalous requests are frequently associated with unsophisticated attacks, and are automatically blocked by Cloudflare's WAF.

With the ongoing war, we continue to onboard and provide protection to organizations in Ukraine and neighboring countries to ensure they have access to information. Any Ukrainian organizations that are facing attack can apply for free protection under Project Galileo by visiting www.cloudflare.com/galileo, and we will expedite their review and approval.

Attack methods based on region

Across the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, and Africa/Middle East regions, the largest fraction (28%) of mitigated requests were classified as “HTTP Anomaly”, with 20% of mitigated requests tagged as SQL injection attempts and nearly 13% as attempts to exploit specific CVEs. CVEs are publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Cloudflare monitors new vulnerabilities and quickly determines which require additional rulesets to protect our users.

In our previous report, we identified similar attack trends with SQLi injection and HTTP anomalies, classified as User agent anomalies, making up a large part of mitigated requests.

Attacks methods by on organization type

We protect a range of organizations under Project Galileo. For this dashboard, we categorized them in 6 groups: community building/social welfare, education, environmental/disaster relief, human rights and journalism. To help understand threats against these groups, we broke down the types of attacks we saw that were mitigated by the web application firewall. A majority of the mitigated traffic is from HTTP anomalies and SQLi (SQL injection).

SQLi is an attack technique designed to modify or retrieve data from SQL databases. By inserting specialized SQL statements into a form field, attackers attempt to execute commands that allow for the retrieval of data from the database, modification of data within the database, the destruction of sensitive data, or other manipulative behaviors.

Learn more on the 8th Anniversary Radar DashboardSee the full report on attack trends we observed against a wide range of organizations protected under Project Galileo.