Cloudflare once again repelled the largest DDoS attack in history – its power reached 5.6 Tbps

Cloudflare said it has repelled the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in history. The incident occurred at the end of October 2024 – the company’s security measures blocked a DDoS attack carried out using the UDP (User Datagram Protocol), its power reached 5.6 Tbit/s.

Image Source: Hack Capital / unsplash.com

The DDoS attack was launched using a variant of the Mirai botnet and targeted an Internet service provider in East Asia. For comparison, shortly before this, also in October 2024, Cloudflare blocked another powerful DDoS attack, which now turned out to be the second largest – its power was 3.8 Tbps. The new attack lasted just over a minute (80 seconds) and was targeted at more than 13,000 Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Image source: cloudflare.com

Adapting to modern realities, cybercriminals are forced to change their strategies, as a result of which DDoS attacks are becoming shorter in duration, but more frequent and more intense. Despite the destructive potential, no damage was caused to the target during the latest incident, Cloudflare noted – the DDoS attack was detected and blocked in a fully automatic mode. “It did not require human intervention, did not cause any alerts or degrade [resources]. The systems continued to operate as normal,” the company said.

The total number of unique IP addresses reached 13,000, but there were 5,500 of them per second. Each of these addresses generated traffic up to 8 Gbps or 1 Gbps on average (0.012% of 5.6 Tbps). Mirai is one of the most notorious botnets. Its source code was published in 2017, and since then various cybercriminals have begun creating their own variants of the botnet. Just this week, two variants were discovered.