Zaid Osta
Zaid Osta is a Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst at Flare, and his primary role involves the collection, research, and analysis of the latest cyber threats.
Sessions
This talk examines the rise of crowdsourced DDoS attacks amid geopolitical events, focusing on the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflicts. Once the domain of well-resourced actors, large-scale attacks now involve networks of novices using open-source tools, provided there are enough individuals sympathetic to a particular political ideology or cause. To incentivize participation, hacktivists employ leaderboards, cryptocurrency rewards, and gamified ranking systems based on contributions to DDoS attacks. This transforms disruptive criminal attacks against services into a competitive and commoditized activity.