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In the first quarter of 2025, MENA companies were hit by a major surge in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, StormWall reports. StormWall identified a 274% year-over-year increase in DDoS attacks in MENA, 5.6 million incidents in just three months in total.
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When it comes to the most targeted verticals, Retail absorbed the most attacks in the MENA region, accounting for 36%. Finance, in second place, made up 21% of attacks. Government (14%), transportation (9%), and telecommunications (7%) were also heavily targeted.
Attackers focused on API endpoints
On a technical level, attackers increasingly focused on API endpoints, with API-layer DDoS attacks growing by 140% year-over-year. The most frequent targets were authentication, search, and payment endpoints, often using traffic that closely mimics legitimate requests. Multi-vector attacks, in which attackers shift between multiple DDoS techniques, increased by 61%. Over half of all attacks now employ more than one vector.
Most of the malicious requests during this period originated from within the MENA region and were aimed largely at retailers, pointing to strong competitive motives behind many of these incidents. Essentially, DDoS attacks became a tool to undermine competitors.
MENA companies facing massive volume of API attacks
And, looking at the distribution of attacks by country, Saudi Arabia became the most attacked, accounting for 28% of DDoS incidents. Iran (16%) and the UAE (14%) followed. Interestingly, 39% of Saudi victims attributed attacks to commercial rivals, with the remainder split between state-linked groups and extortionists.
“I don’t think MENA companies have ever faced such a massive volume of API attacks, if we look at the levels in the first quarter,” said Ramil Khantimirov, CEO and co-founder of StormWall.
“In API attacks it’s much harder to separate legitimate requests from malicious requests, unless the security system analyzes network traffic with AI in real time, which older systems don’t. It’s important to make sure your security solution includes AI or machine learning for network analysis.”
