If physical wars are fought with troops, digital wars are won by infected botnet devices. The more devices enslaved within a botnet, the more powerful the attacks can be. A recent attack has taken the record of the most powerful DDoS attack in history, generating 5.6Tbps of data in a single session.
Cloudflare Puts Up an Amazing Fight Versus a Record-Breaking DDoS Attack
The announcement came from the cybersecurity company Cloudflare. This company provides website owners with protection against DDoS attacks and defends against assaults daily. There’s a good chance that if you’ve ever clicked an “Are you human?” CAPTCHA test, Cloudflare supplied it.
In a blog post by Cloudflare, the cybersecurity company performed a postmortem on what was the most intense DDoS attack in recorded history:
On October 29, a 5.6 Tbps UDP DDoS attack launched by a Mirai-variant botnet targeted a Cloudflare Magic Transit customer, an Internet service provider (ISP) from Eastern Asia. The attack lasted only 80 seconds and originated from over 13,000 IoT devices. Detection and mitigation were fully autonomous by Cloudflare’s distributed defense systems. It required no human intervention, didn’t trigger any alerts, and didn’t cause any performance degradation. The systems worked as intended.
It’s good that companies like Cloudflare are there to protect websites, as botnet owners have been stepping up their game recently. Cloudflare reported that it began to see a spike in DDoS attacks during Q3 2024, and by Q4 2024, it saw an 1885% increase quarter-on-quarter for attacks that used over 1Tbps of traffic.
Botnets are only as strong as the number of devices enslaved on them, so now’s the perfect time to ensure that a cybercriminal doesn’t enroll your gadgets into the next big attack. Check out how to detect and mitigate botnet attacks for more information, and if you have a ton of smart devices, be sure to learn about IoT botnets too.