Largest-Ever DDoS Attack Foiled

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The largest-ever distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was foiled by the internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare. The attack occurred earlier this summer.

According to Cloudflare, its protections mitigated a DDoS attack that pinged 17.2 million requests per second. The attack was committed by a botnet at one of the company’s customers in the financial services space.

The attack was automatically detected and mitigated by Cloudflare’s autonomous edge DDoS protection systems.

A DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.

DDoS attacks achieve effectiveness by utilizing multiple compromised computer systems as sources of attack traffic. Exploited machines can include computers and other networked resources such as IoT devices.

Cloudflare manages an average of more than 25 million HTTP rps, so at its peak, this botnet-driven DDoS attack was sending the equivalent of 68% of Cloudflare’s daily average RPS rate of legitimate traffic.

According to a company blog post, the botnet comprised more than 20,000 bots in 125 countries, with almost 15 percent of the attacks coming from Indonesia and another 17 percent from India and Brazil combined, an indication that there could be many malware-infected devices in those countries.

The company notes that the attack and others like it have been observed in increasing frequency on its network over the past few weeks.