The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) has publicly attributed DDoS activity against public administration targets, which have become frequent, sophisticated, and increasingly threatening. As DDoS activities against public administration targets in the European Union grow not only in scale but also in effort and coordination. Cybersecurity agencies shall prepare for the likelihood of complex multidisciplinary cyberattacks against the public infrastructure of the union.
Cybersecurity in the Union has shifted its focus to the DDoS activities
The European Union is taking steps to roll out public administration services in a fully digitized manner. Attacks against the DDoS European Union public network services are coordinated during politically sensitive developments, like the campaigning for general elections, legislative sessions, and when public-scale political policies are to be announced. They are coordinated to increase the political impact.
As a single public registered DDoS attack used to be routed for stealing sensitive company data, and in some cases, leading to the shutdown of services without threat to public administration, cyber attacks on public administration have grown and expanded, and weak public administration services in the DDoS scheme have grown and expanded.
Public authorities are exposed to flood traffic attacks, weak service attacks, and attacks on combinations of systems. Multiple scattered comprehensive cyber attacks on public and regional admin services of the Union are a rethinking of the DDoS model.
Attacks of this nature are beginning to demonstrate a pattern of aggressive cyber behavior
Growing and warning, ENISA stated:
“Attacks against public administrations are becoming more frequent as well as more sophisticated.”
ENISA identified the use of botnets and the manipulation of archaic and peripheral systems as Exploitative Overload Disruptive (EOD) techniques.
Further detail is provided in the Threat Landscape 2025 report by ENISA, which describes the collaborative synchronicity of adversarial factions ranging from hacktivists to those backed by nation-states.
The World Cybersecurity Agency (WCSA) has noted that:
“Although the drivers are divergent, many of the techniques being deployed are identical.”
This highlights the emergence of collaborative EOD techniques being utilized across adversarial groups.
Rapidly adopted tools and techniques are being shared across ideological and geopolitical divides
These adopted tools and techniques have resulted in highly cohesive and coordinated campaigns of persistent and penetrative attacks in which many governmental systems are attacked simultaneously.
The most concerning of these trends is the use of DDoS attacks as a diversion to hidden attacks such as data exfiltration, theft, or espionage. This allows the cybercriminal to detune the focus of burgeoning attacks against the system to create a window of secondary attacks.
The increase in cyberattacks aimed at public administration means a new cybersecurity policy must be adopted in Europe. ENISA identifies the need for member states to improve infrastructure, address and fix defensive capability gaps for accurate threat response, and increase cross-border cooperation to mitigate these threats.
DSMit AI cyber attacks are key tools to automate threat response
Increased cooperation of DDoS mitigation traffic collaboration is necessary with ISPs and Cloud; what can companies do?
- Deploy an AI-enabled traffic analysis system built on ETI infrastructures, of public and primary DDoS mitigation systems, to counter cyber attacks.
- Perform government IT infrastructure stress tests to identify cybersecurity alerts and mitigate them.
- Public outreach on the impacts of cyber attacks is vital.
The deployment of public services in Europe is becoming digitized and made available in cyberspace.
ENISA public services infrastructure digitized Europe public cybersecurity warns and reminds services in policy, government, and public trust. The preparedness of European states for the advancement of public digitized services against cyberattacks is necessary for public trust in the government. The action taken against cyber attacks is to be on the public services and threats of counter DDoS policies made on the state, cross-border cooperation, and infrastructure build.