Last October, Microsoft managed to mitigate a 2.4 terabits per second (Tbps) denial of service (DDoS) attack that targeted one of its customers, with a peak of 17.2 million requests per second. On June 14, this record was largely beaten since Cloudflare affirms in a blog post, spotted by Numeramablocking a DDoS attack that recorded nearly 26 million requests per second.
A massive DDoS attack against one of Cloudflare’s customers
DDoS attacks aim to overwhelm a website or service with very high traffic, forcing it to disconnect from servers if this flow is not properly managed. For example, by hijacking a network of several thousand computers, smartphones or tablets, hackers manage to connect them simultaneously to the same server in order to saturate it.
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In the case of the attack managed by Cloudflare, the attack came from a cloud provider network and not from a multitude of corrupted connected devices. By using this technique, one can imagine that the cybercriminals who perpetrated the attack used very substantial means to achieve their ends. 5,067 aircraft were used to set up the attack. Each of them generated about 5,200 requests per second.
26 million requests recorded for a DDoS attack: a record
By a simple calculation, we can estimate the number of requests recorded per second: more than 26 million. In less than thirty seconds, these requests from 1,500 networks in 121 countries (mostly clustered in Russia, Brazil, and the United States) were sent.
By comparison, CloudFlare had already mitigated a massive attack earlier in the year, registering “only” 15 million requests per second. In 2021, the firm had also faced a similar attack with a peak of 17.2 million requests per second.
” DDoS attacks of this type are more expensive due to the high cost of an encrypted and secure connection says Omer Yoachimik, product manager at Cloudflare. ” Therefore, it costs more for hackers to launch the attack, and for the victim to mitigate it. This operation is distinguished by the resources it required according to his expertise.
A study by Netscout showed that cybercriminals launched 9.75 million DDoS attacks in 2021, a figure admittedly down from 2020, but up from 2019.