DDoS attack trends in the final quarter of 2020 defied norms in many ways. For the first time in 2020, Cloudflare observed an increase in the number of large DDoS attacks. Specifically, the number of large attacks over 500Mbps and 50K pps saw a massive uptick. In addition, attack vectors continued to evolve, with protocol-based attacks seeing a 3-10x increase compared to the prior quarter. Attackers were also more persistent than ever — nearly 9% of all attacks observed between October and December lasted more than 24 hours.