What are DDoS Attacks and How Do They Affect Government Organizations?
A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to disrupt the normal functioning of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic. Unlike a standard Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack, which typically uses a single source to generate the traffic, a DDoS attack leverages multiple compromised computers distributed across the internet.
DDoS attacks against governments aim to disrupt essential digital services, making websites and networks unavailable, often by flooding them with overwhelming traffic. These attacks are common during elections or geopolitical conflicts, targeting local, state, and national entities with tactics like botnets, and are addressed by agencies like CISA through warnings, defense strategies, and collaboration with international partners.
What DDoS attacks target:
- Public services: Disrupting city websites, digital court services, and utilities.
- Elections: Spikes in attacks often occur during election periods, as seen in France and Ukraine.
- National security: Criminal or state-sponsored threat actors can try to overwhelm digital services used by police, homeland security, or military organizations.
In this article:
Public Services
Public service portals such as government websites, tax systems, health information platforms, and emergency alert systems are frequent DDoS targets. When attackers disrupt these online portals, they prevent citizens from accessing essential information and services, impacting everything from tax filing to healthcare provision. The resulting downtime can erode public confidence and negatively affect daily operations for residents relying on these platforms.
Beyond simple inconvenience, these attacks can stall or paralyze time-sensitive government operations. Service interruptions in sectors like disaster response, law enforcement, or public health can have cascading effects. Attackers may also time DDoS campaigns for periods of increased demand, such as tax season or public health crises.
Elections
Elections are a prime DDoS target due to their critical importance and high public visibility. Attackers may aim to knock out voter information portals, registration systems, or websites providing polling station information. If these resources become unavailable, it can hinder voter participation, slow down vote tallying, or create confusion about results. The impact of DDoS on these systems can bring the integrity of the election process into question.
In recent years, the interconnection between election infrastructure and the internet has expanded, amplifying the risk of service outages caused by DDoS attacks. These attacks may be accompanied by disinformation campaigns, social engineering, or other forms of cyber aggression. Municipal, regional, and national election authorities must anticipate and plan for potential outages.
National Security
Government systems involved in national security are high-value targets for DDoS campaigns, particularly during geopolitical disputes, military operations, or national emergencies. Attackers may aim to disrupt communications infrastructure used by law enforcement, homeland security, or military units by overwhelming VPN gateways, command-and-control platforms, or secure portals that coordinate critical response functions. Even temporary outages can hinder situational awareness, delay decision-making, or impact the coordination of physical security operations.
These attacks are sometimes used as diversionary tactics to mask more covert cyber operations such as data exfiltration or surveillance. DDoS activity against national security assets may coincide with cyber intrusions, physical sabotage, or psychological warfare. Agencies operating in this space require layered defense strategies including dedicated scrubbing centers, out-of-band control channels, and hardened perimeter systems to maintain operational continuity under sustained attack.
Nation-State and State-Aligned Actors
Nation-state or state-aligned actors are among the most advanced DDoS threat groups governments face. These adversaries have significant resources and can orchestrate large-scale, persistent campaigns with sophisticated tools. Their motivations often include exerting political pressure, destabilizing democratic processes, or demonstrating cyber capability.
Such actors may target critical government services during geopolitical conflicts, periods of diplomatic tension, or in the run-up to major public events. Often, these attacks are coordinated with other information operations, such as propaganda campaigns, cyber espionage, or the spread of disinformation. Nation-state actors are known to research technical weaknesses and optimize their attacks to produce maximal operational and psychological impact.
Hacktivist Collectives and Ideological Groups
Hacktivist groups and ideological collectives use DDoS attacks to express political protest, advance causes, or draw media attention to specific issues. These actors often publicize their intentions or outcomes, seeking to embarrass governments and exert public pressure. While technically less advanced than nation-state actors, hacktivist campaigns can still paralyze essential services, especially if timed during periods of increased political sensitivity.
Hacktivist groups typically operate using widely available tools and crowdsource attack participation, making attribution difficult and mitigation unpredictable. Their campaigns can coincide with major political events, legislative changes, or instances of perceived governmental overreach.
Cybercriminals and DDoS-for-Hire Services
Cybercriminals are increasingly turning to DDoS-for-hire, or “booter” services, which allow virtually anyone to launch disruptive attacks for a fee. These operations commoditize DDoS and lower the barrier for targeting government sites, enabling extortion attempts or acting as mercenaries for other groups.
Usually financially motivated, these actors may demand ransom payments in exchange for ceasing attacks, or they may serve clients with political or personal vendettas against government entities. Many DDoS-for-hire services are advertised openly on the dark web and even surface web forums, making massive DDoS power broadly accessible.
Eva Abergel
Eva Abergel is a solution expert in Radware’s security group. Her domain of expertise is DDoS protection, where she leads positioning, messaging and product launches. Prior to joining Radware, Eva led a Product Marketing and Sales Enablement team at a global robotics company acquired by Bosch and worked as an Engineer at Intel. Eva holds a B.Sc. degree in Mechatronics Engineering from Ariel University and an Entrepreneurship Development certificate from the York Entrepreneurship Development Institute of Canada.
Tips from the Expert:
In my experience, here are tips that can help you better defend government systems against DDoS attacks:
Deploy jurisdiction-aware DDoS policies based on geopolitical risk: Implement geo-political threat intelligence into the DDoS mitigation stack. For example, dynamically enforce stricter rate limits or initiate geo-blocking for regions known to be involved in nation-state operations during elections, international summits, or diplomatic tensions.
Integrate DDoS signals with election integrity monitoring: Correlate DDoS telemetry with disinformation campaigns and voter suppression attempts. Feeding Layer 7 anomalies, botnet signatures, and network-layer attacks into election risk dashboards helps SOCs and electoral commissions detect multi-pronged hybrid threats early.
Use decoy portals and sinkholes to exhaust botnets: Deploy sacrificial portals or DNS sinkholes that attract attack traffic and slow down or mislead bots. These environments can mimic real services but are isolated and monitored to capture payloads, observe behavior, and preserve the availability of genuine systems.
Leverage sovereign cloud controls for inter-agency DDoS isolation: Design multi-agency infrastructures in sovereign cloud environments with strict tenancy and inter-network throttling. This helps limit collateral damage when one agency is targeted, especially during coordinated attacks affecting municipalities or electoral districts.
Embed DDoS throttling into legacy app gateways: Since many government services still rely on legacy applications, embed API and session throttling mechanisms at the gateway or proxy layer. This provides a stopgap defense when underlying systems cannot be upgraded or patched easily.
Volumetric Network-Layer Floods Against Public Services
Volumetric DDoS attacks are the most visible form of disruption, designed to overwhelm network infrastructure by sending huge tiers of traffic to public service endpoints. Attackers often exploit poorly secured devices or use amplification techniques such as DNS or NTP reflection to multiply traffic, saturating the target’s bandwidth. This can make entire websites, API endpoints, or the underlying data centers inaccessible, impacting thousands of users simultaneously.
These attacks may last minutes or persist for hours, depending on defenses and the attacker’s resources. Public services with limited upstream bandwidth, especially in regional branches or underfunded agencies, remain particularly vulnerable. Despite their simplicity, volumetric attacks remain effective and are frequently combined with other vectors for greater effect.
Protocol Abuse Targeting Legacy Government Infrastructure
Many government systems rely on older network protocols and technologies that were not designed with modern security threats in mind. Attackers exploit weaknesses in protocols like TCP/IP, UDP, and legacy VPN or remote access appliances, abusing them to trigger excessive resource consumption or disrupt essential communication processes. For example, SYN flood attacks create a backlog of half-open connections.
Because legacy systems often lack regular patching or robust default security controls, protocol attacks can produce outsized disruption compared to attacks on well-maintained private sector systems. Agencies with technical debt must prioritize protocol hardening, routine audits, and modernization efforts to minimize the attack surface and preempt protocol-specific DDoS risks.
Application-Layer Attacks on Citizen-Facing Portals
Application-layer (Layer 7) attacks target the actual services and business logic provided by government portals. Attackers generate seemingly legitimate traffic such as repeated form submissions, search queries, or document downloads that evade traditional network-layer DDoS detection.
These attacks aim to exhaust back-end database capacity or trigger cascading failures in authentication or content management systems, driving up resource consumption with minimal traffic footprint. Layer 7 DDoS attacks are difficult to spot since the request volume may appear “normal” from a traffic perspective, requiring deeper inspection of user behavior and real-time analytics.
Low-And-Slow Persistent DDoS Campaigns
Low-and-slow DDoS techniques differ from traditional floods by employing sustained, low-intensity traffic designed to degrade service gradually or evade detection. Instead of overwhelming servers outright, attackers test system limits by stretching out attacks, keeping resource consumption just above operational thresholds. This can cause intermittent outages, slowdowns in processing user requests, or untraceable errors in legacy systems.
These persistent campaigns are challenging to diagnose because performance degradation may not be immediately attributed to attack activity. Resource exhaustion, session pileups, and subtle service unavailability can frustrate users and complicate government incident response. Long-term monitoring and traffic analysis are necessary for prompt detection and mitigation.
Related content: Read our guide to DDoS types.
Organizations operating in the government sector should consider the following practices to protect themselves from DDoS attacks.
1. Designing DDoS-Resilient Public Digital Services
Building public services to withstand DDoS requires a defense-in-depth approach from the earliest design phases. This includes leveraging cloud-native architectures with elasticity, auto-scaling, and distributed infrastructure to mitigate the impact of sudden traffic surges. Integrating global content delivery networks (CDNs) and redundant DNS providers can further absorb and route attack traffic, preserving access for legitimate users.
DDoS resilience also means eliminating single points of failure and enabling rapid restoration of affected services. Government architects should anticipate worst-case scenarios through threat modeling, regular review of system dependencies, and inclusion of real-time monitoring. These steps, combined with network segmentation and access controls, reduce DDoS impact and speed recovery when incidents occur.
2. Contracting and Validating Third-Party Mitigation Providers
Working with specialized DDoS mitigation providers is essential, but diligence is required during procurement. Governments should establish rigorous criteria for vendor selection, including capabilities for multi-vector attack detection, real-time traffic scrubbing, comprehensive logging, and proven incident response track records. Service level agreements (SLAs) should specify response times, mitigation effectiveness, and full transparency during incidents.
Validation shouldn’t end at contract signing. Agencies must regularly test providers’ capabilities through simulations and establish clear escalation workflows for coordinating defense. Annual reviews, real-world incident debriefs, and joint exercises can ensure the service meets the evolving threat landscape. Public sector IT security managers should maintain up-to-date contacts and require immediate access to technical support during critical incidents.
3. Regular Stress Testing and DDoS Simulations
Proactive stress testing is key to identifying weaknesses in defensive strategies before attackers do. Government agencies should schedule regular DDoS drills that involve both internal IT teams and external service providers, simulating multiple attack types on production or tightly controlled replica environments. These exercises help assess incident response readiness, reveal bottlenecks, and validate scaling policies or failover systems under real-world pressure.
Post-test analysis, including a review of system logs, alert timelines, and mitigation efficacy, is crucial for continuous improvement. Simulation results should inform updates to response playbooks, staff training, and technical investments. Integrating stress testing into regular cybersecurity assessments ensures ongoing resilience.
4. Coordinating Response Playbooks Across Agencies
Effective DDoS response hinges on coordinated action between all affected agencies and tiers of government. Standardized playbooks should define roles, escalation procedures, cross-agency notification requirements, and automated incident tracking. Centralized control points enable swift decision-making, while federated technical actions such as rate limiting or route changes can be implemented in parallel to minimize disruption.
Practice and review are essential: joint tabletop exercises and communications drills ensure stakeholders know their responsibilities. Agencies should integrate lessons learned from each event, adjusting plans to address any gaps. Inter-agency coordination reduces confusion, shortens resolution times, and preserves essential services when attacks threaten multiple government platforms simultaneously.
5. Public Communication Strategies During DDoS Events
Transparent, timely communication is vital during DDoS events to maintain public confidence and manage expectations. Governments should predefine messaging templates, designate spokespersons, and leverage multiple channels (including web, social media, and SMS alerts) to notify citizens of service interruptions.
Proactive updates reduce confusion, discourage speculation, and provide guidance on alternative access options or expected restoration times. Internal communication is just as important: all staff, especially those in public-facing roles, should receive timely updates and clear scripts for responding to inquiries. Post-incident, a follow-up communication should outline the cause, mitigation steps, and future prevention efforts, reinforcing accountability.
Government agencies must protect public-facing portals, election systems, financial platforms, and interagency services from disruption by nation-state actors, hacktivist groups, and DDoS-for-hire campaigns. Because these attacks often aim to undermine public trust as much as service availability, mitigation must be fast, resilient, and scalable across distributed environments.
Radware DefensePro provides inline, behavior-based DDoS mitigation that detects and blocks volumetric floods, protocol abuse targeting legacy infrastructure, and application-layer attacks against citizen-facing services. Continuous traffic baselining enables early identification of low-and-slow campaigns designed to evade traditional thresholds.
For large-scale or politically motivated attacks that exceed local capacity, Radware Cloud DDoS Protection Service delivers global scrubbing to absorb malicious traffic upstream, protecting public services, election portals, and government APIs from sustained disruption. Hybrid deployment models ensure consistent protection across data centers and public cloud platforms.
Radware Cloud Application Protection Service strengthens application-layer resilience with integrated WAF, API protection, bot mitigation, and application-layer DDoS defenses. This helps secure digital citizen services and reduce exposure to targeted HTTP floods and automated abuse.
Threat Intelligence Subscriptions provide continuously updated insight into active botnets, state-aligned campaigns, and coordinated attack infrastructure, enabling proactive blocking and faster interagency response coordination.
Together, these layered capabilities support resilient public digital services, validated mitigation partnerships, coordinated response playbooks, and rapid recovery during high-visibility DDoS events.