The giant Cloudflare’s system managed to mitigate a huge distributed denial of service attack on HTTP, peaking at 71 million requests per second! According to the American company, this is a new record!
This weekend was intense for Cloudflare’s infrastructure because it was not one DDoS attack that was mitigated, but dozens of very large attacks. Among them, the record attack. According to Omer Yoachimik, Julien Desgats, and Alex Forster of Cloudflare: ” The majority of attacks peaked at 50-70 million requests per second (rps), with the largest exceeding 71 million rps. ”
The graph below clearly shows this important peak:
This is the first time that an HTTP DDoS attack has reached such a high number of requests per second , far exceeding the previous record recorded by Cloudflare: ” This is the largest HTTP DDoS attack ever reported, with more than 35 % more than the previous reported high of 46 million requests per second in June 2022. ”
To carry out such an attack, it is necessary to have a significant strike force. According to Cloudflare, these attacks were launched from more than 30,000 different IP addresses belonging to several cloud providers . Finally, it’s not that huge so the machines used must be relatively powerful.
As far as the targets are concerned , they are varied since Cloudflare evokes hosts, companies specializing in cryptocurrencies, or even online game providers .
Although this is a record, it is quite possible that it will be broken in the near future. In its report on DDoS attacks, Cloudflare states that the amount of HTTP DDoS attacks has increased by 79% in a single year . Other vendors like Google and Akamai are forced to be able to mitigate these large attacks.
Cloudflare’s report on this attack can be accessed here .
