Web infrastructure company Cloudflare revealed it detected and blocked dozens of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, the majority of which peaked 50-70 million requests per second (RPS) with the largest exceeding 71 million RPS. This marks the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack recorded to date.
The 71 million RPS DDoS attack is more than 35% larger than the previously reported record of 46 million RPS in June 2022. The company said that the attacks were HTTP/2-based and originated from more than 30,000 IP addresses.
Targeted websites included those of an unnamed gaming company, cryptocurrency companies, hosting providers, and cloud computing platforms.
According to Cloudflare, the newly observed attack is not related to the recent DDoS campaign against healthcare industry orchestrated by the pro-Russia hacktivist group Killnet, nor it appears to be linked to the US Super Bowl game event.
The company has warned that size, sophistication, and frequency of attacks has been increasing over the past months.
“We saw that the amount of HTTP DDoS attacks increased by 79% year-over-year. Furthermore, the amount of volumetric attacks exceeding 100 Gbps grew by 67% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ), and the number of attacks lasting more than three hours increased by 87% QoQ,” Cloudflare said in a blog post. “But it doesn’t end there. The audacity of attackers has been increasing as well. In our latest DDoS threat report, we saw that Ransom DDoS attacks steadily increased throughout the year. They peaked in November 2022 where one out of every four surveyed customers reported being subject to Ransom DDoS attacks or threats.”