Cloudflare, a cloud infrastructure network, has announced that it has automatically blocked a hyper-volume DDoS attack that peaked at 11.5 Tbps and 5.1 billion packets per second. In recent weeks, the company’s defenses have autonomously suppressed hundreds of such attempts, preventing customer disruptions.
Cloudflare, a cloud infrastructure network, has announced that it has automatically blocked a hyper-volume DDoS attack that peaked at 11.5 Tbps and 5.1 billion packets per second. In recent weeks, the company’s defenses have autonomously suppressed hundreds of such attempts, preventing customer disruptions.
As TechRadar reports, in a short statement, Cloudflare clarified that at first it seemed that it was a UDP flood mainly from the Google Cloud infrastructure, but later the company corrected itself: the traffic was formed by a combination of infected IoT devices and several cloud providers, and Google Cloud was only one of the sources. The attack lasted a few tens of seconds, but the peak values were enough to test the network throughput and the quality of automated protection.
The metrics Cloudflare cites are important for a variety of reasons. Tbps (terabits per second) is the «weight» of traffic, measuring how much channel capacity attackers are trying to «clog». Bpps (billions of packets per second) shows the rate at which network devices are flooded with individual packets and impacts the performance of routers and balancers. The combination of high Tbps and record Bpps simultaneously means an attempt to hit both the channel and the network hardware.
At the same time, this is not an absolute Internet record: even more massive attacks have been recorded before. In particular, in June, an attack was reported that «poured» 37.4 TB of data onto a single IP address in 45 seconds; its peak speed reached 7.3 Tbit/s and it was also neutralized by Cloudflare (we wrote about this separately) — this allows us to speak of the current incident as one of the largest in recent months, but not necessarily the largest.
DDoS attacks are becoming cheaper and more massive: it is becoming easier to assemble a botnet from surveillance cameras, routers, and «smart» devices, and «DDoS as a service» is being sold on shady sites for ~$20/hour. That is why attacks are becoming both more frequent and larger. In June, we already recorded a surge in «hyper-volume» episodes (the aforementioned attack of 37 TB in 45 seconds to one address), and the current case only confirms the trend of increasing peak loads and complexity of traffic sources.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how the number of cyberattacks on Ukrainian companies increased by almost 70% in 2024, reaching 4,315 incidents, which is an average of about 12 major incidents per day. In response to constant threats, from DDoS attacks to ransomware, Ukrainian businesses are actively investing in cybersecurity, choosing ready-made comprehensive solutions.
