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Cloudflare has managed to repel the largest DDoS attack ever to date in terms of volume. This was not a single wave of attacks, but a slew of DDoS attacks. The average peak of the attacks was between 50 and 70 million requests per second (rps).

According to Cloudflare, the giant attack now repelled was much higher than previous ones in terms of volume. Google knocked off an attack in June 2022 with an average peak at 46 million rps. In the recent attack, the absolute peak was at a time above 71 million rps. The largest DDoS attack that Cloudflare itself had repelled so far recorded an average peak of 26 million rps.

Mainly attacks from cloud providers

As in the earlier cases, the DDoS attack involved an HTTP/2 attack and targeted websites protected by Cloudflare. The attacks, most likely using a botnet, came from more than 30,000 different IP addresses. Targets of the attacks included a gaming provider, crypto currency companies, hosting providers and cloud platforms.

It is also notable that precisely many of the attacks came from cloud providers. According to Cloudflare, the number of DDoS attacks coming from these types of providers has been increasing for the past year. Cloudflare is therefore keen to help these companies and provides a free botnet threat feed. This feed gives cloud providers threat intelligence about their own IP ranges. It detects attacks coming from within their own environments. Hopefully these providers will do something with it, something that is not obvious unfortunately.

Growth of DDoS attacks worrisome

Cloudflare does worry about the growth in the number of very large-scale DDoS attacks in recent years. The size and frequency of the attacks have been increasing in recent months. Not only has the number of HTTP DDoS attacks increased 79 percent, the volume above 100 Gbps increased 67 percent quarterly. The number of attacks lasting longer than three hours increased by 87 percent.

Furthermore, Cloudflare notes that the number of highly malicious attacks is also increasing significantly. Last year, for example, the number of Ransom DDoS attacks also increased. In the month of November last year, one in four of the Cloudflare customers surveyed experienced Ransom DDoS attacks or threats.

Also read: Google claims it blocked the largest DDoS attack ever