Cloudflare mitigated 2 Tbps DDoS attack, the largest attack it has seen to date

Cloudflare announced to have mitigated a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at almost 2 terabytes per second (Tbps).

Cloudflare, Inc. is an American web infrastructure and website security company that provides content delivery network and DDoS mitigation services. The company announced to have mitigated a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked just below 2 terabytes per second (Tbps), which is the largest attack Cloudflare has seen to date.

The attack was launched by a Mirai botnet variant composed of 15,000 bots, it combined DNS amplification attacks and UDP floods. The botnet included Internet of Things (IoT) devices and GitLab instances.

“This was a multi-vector attack combining DNS amplification attacks and UDP floods. The entire attack lasted just one minute. The attack was launched from approximately 15,000 bots running a variant of the original Mirai code on IoT devices and unpatched GitLab instances.” reads the post published by Cloudflare.

Experts warn that terabit-strong attacks are becoming common confirming the trend in the overall increase of the intensity of distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Cloudflare Q3 DDoS Trends report also revealed that network-layer DDoS attacks increased by 44% quarter-over-quarter.

In August, the company announced that it has mitigated the largest ever volumetric distributed denial of service attack to date. The malicious traffic reached a record high of 17.2 million requests-per-second (rps), a volume three times bigger than previously reported HTTP DDoS attacks.

In October, Microsoft announced that its Azure cloud service mitigated a 2.4 terabytes per second (Tbps) DDoS attack at the end of August, it represents the largest DDoS attack recorded to date. The attack was aimed at an Azure customer in Europe, but Microsoft did not disclose the name of the victim. This is the largest DDoS attack that hit Azure customers prior to August 2020 when experts observed a 1 Tbps attack.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, DDoS)

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