Cloudflare, the American web infrastructure and website security company, mitigated the largest volumetric DDoS attack ever seen in history, with 17,2 million requests per second.
In a recent blog post, Cloudflare reported that it had successfully mitigated the largest distributed denial of service attack (Distributed Denial Of Service), known as DDoS, never seen before in history. The massive volumetric attack was aimed at one of the American company's clients, although its name was not revealed at the moment.
According to publication, its DDoS protection system automatically detected and managed to thwart the distributed denial of service attack, which directed 17,2 million requests per second (rps) against one of its clients dedicated to the financial sector. As Omar Yoachimik, product manager for DDoS protection at the web infrastructure and security company, explains, this DDoS attack is the largest reported and ever seen in history; he even pointed out that it was 3 times larger than any recorded or known attack so far.
Yoachimik also explained that Cloudflare serves more than 25 million HTTP requests per second on average, so the massive DDoS attack reached 68% of its average RPS rate for the entire second quarter. However, he noted that the system was able to stop the attack automatically and that it did not require manual intervention from staff.
In the few seconds that the attack lasted, the anonymous Cloudflare customer received 330 million attack requests. The attacker's intention with this volumetric DDoS was to overload and bring the server to a standstill with significantly high volumes of malicious traffic.
It may interest you: Phishing attacks in the crypto industry grew 22% during the first half
20.000 infected computers in 125 countries
According to the report presented by Cloudflare, the attacker used more than 20.000 computers located in 125 countries, which were infected with the Mirai malware, known as malicious software targeting devices that make up the Internet of Things (IoT).
Mirai was discovered in 2016 and classified as one of the largest botnets on the web, with millions of devices of all kinds infected globally. Although the developers of this malware were arrested and face criminal charges for computer crimes, several variants of Mirai have come onto the market. In its post, Cloudflare noted that the massive DDoS attack suffered by its client was carried out by a variant of Mirai.
Fifteen percent of the DDoS attack originated in Indonesia and another 15 percent between India and Brazil, the company said. The rest of the attack came from many malware-infected devices located in more than 17 countries, according to the IP addresses of the computers involved in the attack.
Frequency of DDoS attacks
While the 17,2 million rps DDoS is the largest seen to date, data analyzed by Cloudflare indicates that it is at least the second large volumetric DDoS attack seen in the past week. In the second week of August, Cloudflare stopped another massive DDoS attack, which directed 8 million requests per second at another of its customers, a hosting service provider.
The company also detected several other DDoS attacks targeting telecom and gaming companies in recent weeks. In all cases, the attacks were stopped by its system without human intervention, it said.
Given the magnitude of the latest DDoS attack reported by the company, several cybersecurity analysts have stated that it is not an isolated attacker, but rather a group of cybercriminals who are well-funded and focused on infecting as many devices as possible to send massive amounts of malicious traffic to companies. Experts have also expressed concern about the large number of devices infected with malware in countries such as Indonesia, India and Brazil.
More than 2,9 million attacks in the first quarter
Un report According to a report by Netscout, a cyber threat intelligence and analytics provider, a total of 2021 million DDoS attacks targeting different industries were carried out in the first quarter of 2,9 alone. This figure represents 31% more than the number of DDoS attacks seen in the same period in 2020. The analytics firm noted that the exponential increase in distributed denial of service attacks followed the spread of the Covid pandemic globally.
Netscout also noted that if the current trend continues, the total number of DDoS attacks in 2021 will surpass the record number seen in 2020, which was 10 million attacks for the entire year.
In the crypto industry, one of the latest to report a massive DDoS attack was “Cobra,” the anonymous operator of the Bitcoin.org website.
Continue reading: DDoS attack on Bitcoin.org: Cobra reports a massive attack on the web portal
