Record! This Was the Biggest DDoS Attack Ever Recorded

Cloudflare has set a new DDoS attack record . It was the largest on record to date, with millions of requests per second and tens of thousands of infected devices or bots capable of forwarding HTTP requests. This has raised an alert to cybersecurity companies, since it has made it clear that hackers are increasing their capabilities to carry out these types of attacks.

New record in a DDoS attack

Specifically, it is an attack in which Cloudflare has registered 17.2 million requests per second . It is the largest attack that has been recorded and in order to achieve it, some 28,000 infected devices have participated and distributed throughout the world, since they were present in 125 countries.

the Biggest DDoS Attack Ever Recorded

A DDoS attack consists of carrying out many requests in a very short time. We speak of thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions, as is this case. This can cause a server to become overwhelmed and unable to serve users. Take, for example, a web page that suddenly begins to receive thousands and thousands of requests per second for which it is not capable.

From Cloudflare they indicate that this attack was directed at one of their financial clients. The defenses of this content delivery service had to be put to good use. It was detected and mitigated, something that shows that they have a good protection system.

Defensive work in these cases basically consists of analyzing incoming traffic and thus detecting unusual spikes. This can surface a DDoS attack attempt and mitigate it as soon as possible. In this case, we are talking about a botnet made up of almost 30,000 infected devices that were able to send around 330 million HTTP requests during the duration of the attack.

Los ataques DDoS en aumento

Mirai malware may be behind this attack

Cloudflare, which is constantly vigilant, believes that a variant of the Mirai malware may be behind this attack. It is a security threat whose mission is to infect devices of what is known as the Internet of Things, which can be televisions, smart light bulbs or surveillance cameras, for example, and make them join your botnet or “ army ”to launch such massive attacks.

It must be remembered that Mirai was already present in some of the largest DDoS attacks in history, so it is not surprising that in this case it is this same malware or any variant.

It is important to avoid DDoS attacks on the router and other devices. Something fundamental is to keep any equipment that is connected to the network perfectly up to date . Normally this type of malware will exploit a vulnerability that has not been corrected or detect a bad configuration.

Ultimately, Cloudflare has detected what to date is the largest DDoS attack ever recorded. In total 17.2 million HTTP requests per second, coming from a botnet of about 28,000 infected devices. It is essential to always have security measures in place, in addition to checking that any appliance we have at home is up to date.