Financial institutions sit at the sharp end of the DDoS threat: they are attacked more often, by more kinds of adversary, and under more regulatory scrutiny than almost any other sector. A bank or fintech can face a state-sponsored campaign for geopolitical signalling, a criminal group using a flood as cover for fraud, and an activist group timing an outage to a political moment — sometimes in the same week. And unlike most industries, when the site goes down the regulator wants to know why.
Who Attacks Finance, and Why
- State-sponsored actors use DDoS as visible, deniable disruption during geopolitical tension.
- Cybercrime groups launch a flood as a smokescreen — while responders fight the outage, fraudulent transactions or account takeovers run underneath.
- Hacktivists target banks tied to controversial policies or events, when public attention is highest.
- Extortionists (ransom DDoS) threaten payment or trading infrastructure where every minute of downtime has a hard monetary cost.
The Regulatory Weight
In finance, resilience against DDoS is not a best practice you may adopt — it is increasingly written into binding rules.
- DORA (EU Digital Operational Resilience Act): documented ICT risk management including DDoS scenarios, with binding enforcement from January 2025.
- FFIEC guidance (US): financial institutions must test resilience to DDoS and maintain incident-response playbooks.
- PSD2 / open banking: third-party API endpoints dramatically expand the attack surface that has to be defended.
- Basel III operational risk: DDoS-driven downtime factors into operational-risk capital calculations.
What DORA Actually Demands
DORA requires financial entities to withstand, respond to and recover from ICT threats, and — crucially — to prove it. Protection has to be documented, tested and auditable, and where a third party provides it, that provider becomes an accountable ICT service provider with its own obligations. In practice this means you need not just working protection but a paper trail: what is in place, how it was tested, and what happened during each incident.
The audit trail is half the requirement
For a regulated firm, mitigating an attack is only half the job. If you cannot produce a record — what was attacked, when, how it was handled — you have not satisfied the requirement, however well the defence worked. Reporting is a first-class feature, not an afterthought.
How Akarguard Fits a Regulated Stack
Akarguard is a Layer 7 reverse proxy: it filters application-layer attacks, applies your WAF and rate limits, and hides your origin so it cannot be hit directly. Protection is always-on via a DNS change rather than a switch someone has to flip, automatic mitigation escalates the moment an attack is detected, and every incident produces a downloadable PDF report — timeline, peak rates, attack type, source ASN distribution — that feeds the documentation DORA and FFIEC expect. A DPA is available for the GDPR side, and data stays in the EU. One honest boundary: Akarguard defends the application layer and hides the origin; raw volumetric floods at the network are handled upstream by your host or transit provider, and your resilience programme should document that split.