Cloudflare Thwarts Largest DDoS Attack on Record: 71M Requests

Cloudflare has blocked dozens of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks aimed at its customers over the weekend. With 71 million requests per second (rps), one of the attacks is described as the largest volumetric distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to date, while the majority of the other attacks peaked at 50-70 million rps.

The 71 rps attack is 35% higher than the previous DDoS attack record with 46 million rps in June 2022, as stated by Cloudflare.

The attacks were launched from over 30,000 IP addresses from various cloud providers and targeted various companies. Gaming, hosting, and cryptocurrency were among the industries targeted and cloud platforms.

DDoS Threats Continue to Rise

The DDoS attacks might have different motives; it is not disclosed whether threat actors conducted these DDoS attacks to hide other malicious activity, to interrupt security for other specific attacks such as ransomware, or to simply disrupt workflow.

In recent years, volumetric DDoS attacks have been growing, and some botnets have been using powerful devices to hit targets with millions of requests per second. The Mēris botnet, for example, hit Yandex with a 21.8 million RPS attack in September 2021.

According to Cloudflare Q4 DDoS Threat Report, the number of HTTP DDoS attacks increased 79% annually, while the number of attacks lasting more than three hours increased 87% quarterly.