# DDoS Attacks on Financial Services: Regulatory Requirements and Defense > Banks and fintechs face DDoS attacks from state actors, cybercrime groups, and activists. Regulators in the EU and US now mandate specific resilience requirements. - Category: Compliance - Author: Akarguard Team, Security Engineering - Published: Sep 13, 2026 - Canonical: https://akarguard.net/blog/financial-services-ddos --- 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. --- Source: Akarguard Security Blog (https://akarguard.net/blog). Akarguard provides DDoS protection: traffic is proxied through our edge, attack traffic is filtered, and clean traffic reaches your origin. Reuse of this article with attribution and a link to the canonical URL is permitted.