Bethany Alvaro 
According to the AI-Empowered Botnets and API Visibility: Attack Trends in Financial Services report, 52 per cent of all global distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks occurred in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia.
DDoS attacks involve a malicious actor disrupting and overwhelming a service network, making tracking and detection efforts extremely difficult to manage.
Targeting banks specifically, the report, led by Akamai, found that the banking sector in the region accounted for 92 per cent of “lower-level network attacks”.
Globally, 96 per cent of banks and financial institutions have experienced a DDoS or application programming interface (API) style of cyber security incident over the past year, indicating both the growth and gap of prevention these types of attacks are generating.
“APAC’s banks and fintechs sit at the centre of one of the world’s fastest-moving digital financial environments. Every new payment service, mobile banking feature, fintech integration and AI-enabled workflow creates another dependency for attackers to probe,” said Reuben Koh, director of security technology and strategy for APJ at Akamai.
“Many banks are also securing new digital services on top of legacy systems that may be difficult to patch or integrate securely.
“If an institution does not know which APIs exist, which ones expose sensitive data, or how they are supposed to behave, it is already operating with an elevated level of risk.”
Akamai reports that the surge in concentrated attacks may be due to artificial intelligence, citing a 147 per cent increase in bot activity mimicking real user behaviour and patterns, accelerating the existing challenge of identifying DDoS threats.
The report says that businesses must “evolve from a compliance function into an operational resilience priority” by increasing security defence and response in the face of emerging threats.
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