Financial institutions in the UAE were recently hit by wave upon wave of high intensity distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that lasted for a total of six days. The attacks achieved a peak volume of 14.7m requests per second (RPS) with an average level of 4.5m RPS. Over the course of the attack, legitimate requests to the targeted institutions dipped as low as 0.002% and the average legitimate traffic over the period was only 0.12%.

The attacks are said to be the work of a pro-Palestinian hacktivist group called SN_BLACKMETA who announced their intentions to carry out the attack on its

Telegram channel before the event. The group is believed to have ties with another hacktivist group called Anonymous Sudan who are known for carrying out similar types of attacks.

Researchers assess that SN_BLACKMETA is likely to have used a DDoS service called Infrashutdown to carry out the attacks for a relatively low cost