Web infrastructure company Cloudflare announced Monday that it had thwarted a record-breaking distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 71 million requests per second (RPS).
“Most of the attacks peaked in the ballpark of 50 to 70 million requests per second (RPS), with peaks in excess of 71 million,” the company said, calling it a “hypervolume” DDoS attack. I’m in.
This is also the largest HTTP DDoS attack ever reported, more than 35% higher than the previous 46M RPS DDoS attack that Google Cloud mitigated in June 2022.
Cloudflare said the attack singled out websites protected by its platform and originated from a botnet consisting of more than 30,000 IP addresses belonging to “many” cloud providers.
The targeted websites included popular game providers, cryptocurrency companies, hosting providers and cloud computing platforms.
This kind of HTTP attack is designed to send a large number of HTTP requests to the target website. The goal is to prevent access, usually at a level higher than the website can handle.
“If there is a sufficiently high volume of requests, the website’s servers cannot handle all the attack requests along with the legitimate user requests,” said Cloudflare.
“Users experience slow loading websites, timeouts, and eventually not being able to connect to the desired website at all.”
The development comes at a time when DDoS attacks are increasing in size, sophistication and frequency, with the company recording a 79% year-over-year surge in HTTP DDoS attacks in the final quarter of 2022. increase.
Additionally, the number of volumetric attacks lasting longer than three hours jumped 87% compared to the previous three months.
Major industries attacked during this period include aviation, education, gaming, hospitality, and telecommunications. Georgia, Belize, and San Marino emerged as some of the top countries targeted by HTTP DDoS attacks in Q4 2022.
Meanwhile, network-layer DDoS attacks include China, Lithuania, Finland, Singapore, Taiwan, Belgium, Costa Rica, UAE, South Korea, and Turkey.
