Liputan6.com, Jakarta In 2024, cybersecurity company Akamai, saw numerous supply chain attacks where service providers, hardware and software manufacturers were completely compromised and malware was introduced into the software or in the systems their customers relied on.
For example, the Clock ransomware attacked software vendor Muvit to inject or rather infect their customers with ransomware.
Reuben Koh, Director, Security Technology & Strategy APJ from Akamai, said that many cyber attacks are actually the result of attacks sponsored by a country.
“This means that many of these attacks are actually carried out by teams of hackers, or elite hackers, who are sponsored by a country or government in the world to carry out cyber espionage or cyber interference and so on,” said Reuben in a Media Roundtable session entitled Akamai’s Year in Review 2024 & Notable Issues in 2025 which was held virtually, Friday (24/1/2025).
Instead of targeting individual targets, they target service providers at the top, such as telecommunications companies, or telecommunications service providers, which have hundreds or thousands of customers.
“So by infecting the supply chain at the top, they can have easy access to the service provider’s customers. That’s an area we see growing rapidly in 2024,” Reuben explained.
He said this was partly due to the increase in geopolitical events such as wars and conflicts and tensions that occurred throughout the world last year.
“In Asia Pacific and Japan, we are directly seeing a huge increase in layer 7 DDoS attacks. That’s roughly a five to six-fold increase compared to 2023. And this is basically across the board,” Reuben said.
He added, this DDoS attack targets web platforms or web applications that are exposed on the Internet. And in Asia Pacific, the increase was the largest worldwide, which was around six times compared to last year.