Cloudflare, one of the world’s leading content delivery network providers, reported an unprecedented Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack during the second weekend of February. The company claims it has identified and neutralized hundreds of hyper-volume DDoS attacks that peaked at 50-70 million requests per second (rps), with the largest attack surpassing 71 million rps.
DDoS attacks are notorious for paralyzing websites or services by directing numerous devices to a particular site or service, rendering it unusable. This attack did not aim to penetrate anywhere, but it could cause damage and revenue loss in some cases.
According to Cloudflare, the attack was based on HTTP/2 and involved around 30,000 requests with different IP addresses from multiple providers. The company is currently working with these providers to contain the botnets involved in the attacks.
Cloudflare stated that the attack targeted various game providers, cryptocurrency companies, hosting providers, and cloud hosting platforms.
The company notes that DDoS attacks’ frequency, scale, and sophistication have steadily increased over the past few years. The number of HTTP DDoS attacks observed in 2022 has nearly doubled compared to 2021. Furthermore, Cloudflare’s latest DDoS Threat Report shows a steady increase in Ransom DDoS attacks throughout the year, peaking in November 2022. One in four customers surveyed reported experiencing a ransom DDoS attack or threat.
