Massive 11.5 Terabyte-per-second DDoS assault thwarted by Cloudflare mere two months following precedent-setting DDoS attack record.
In a remarkable display of cybersecurity resilience, Cloudflare, a leading internet infrastructure and security company, recently announced that it had successfully blocked a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack with a peak traffic of 11.5 Terabits per second (Tbps). This attack, which lasted approximately 35 seconds, dwarfs the company's previous records and sets a new benchmark in the realm of cybersecurity.
The previous record for Cloudflare was a 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack in June, which itself surpassed the 3.8 Tbps attack from October 2024. The report by BleepingComputer, a reputable source in the cybersecurity industry, had previously mentioned a record of 2 Bbps, making the recent attack nearly 10 times the size of the three-year-old record.
The recent attacks have been taking advantage of the infrastructure operated by cloud service providers, with the majority of the traffic for the 11.5 Tbps attack coming from Google Cloud. These attacks often utilize compromised devices like Internet of Things (IoT) equipment and routers across more than 11,000 unique networks worldwide.
The nature of the attack was a UDP flood, where attackers send large amounts of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) traffic with spoofed IP addresses to random ports on a targeted system. This type of attack can quickly exhaust the resources of a targeted server.
Despite the growing size of DDoS attacks, so far, companies like Cloudflare are keeping pace. The company plans to reveal more information about these attacks in an upcoming report. It's worth noting that the largest DDoS attack Cloudflare had mitigated in 2021 was smaller than the recent attacks, with a peak traffic of 1.9 Tbps.
This incident underscores the importance of robust cybersecurity measures in the face of increasingly sophisticated threats. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, it's clear that companies must adapt and strengthen their defenses to protect against such attacks.
