Highlights:

  • Numerous cloud providers were responsible for the attacks, and Cloudflare cooperated with the unnamed providers to take down the botnet utilized in the DDoS attacks.
  • It’s unknown what spurred the attacks over the weekend; according to Cloudflare, they had nothing to do with Killnet or the Super Bowl.

The largest known HTTP DDoS attack in history was one of many “hyper-volumetric” distributed denial-of-service attempts that Cloudflare Inc., a content delivery network provider, identified and stopped over the weekend of February 11–12.

Most DDoS attacks peaked at between 50 million and 70 million requests per second (rps), with the biggest attack topping 71 million rps. The biggest attack exceeded the previous HTTP DDoS record of 46 million rps in June 2022 by 35%.

The assaults were HTTP/2-based and came from more than 30,000 IP addresses, according to Cloudflare. Cloudflare targeted several websites for protection: a well-known gaming provider, cryptocurrency firms, hosting providers, and cloud computing platforms.

Numerous cloud providers were responsible for the attacks, and Cloudflare cooperated with the unnamed providers to take down the botnet utilized in the DDoS attacks. The business states that over the past year, it has observed increased threats from cloud computing providers.

Cloudflare is giving service providers access to a free botnet threat feed in response to cloud computing providers being utilized as attack points. The stream provides providers with threat intelligence regarding attacks from within their autonomous systems and IP space.

It’s unknown what spurred the attacks over the weekend; according to Cloudflare, they had nothing to do with Killnet or the Super Bowl. A DDoS attack from the Russian Killnet hacker gang earlier last month targeted healthcare businesses.

According to Cloudflare, the size and complexity of DDoS attacks have grown over the past few months. The number of HTTP DDoS attacks rose 79% year-over-year, and the number of volumetric attacks exceeding 100 gigabits per second rose 67% quarter-over-year, according to Cloudflare’s fourth-quarter DDoS threat report, which was published in January.

Additionally, growing every year is the scale of DDoS attacks. Before Google Cloud announced in August that it had successfully repelled a DDoS attack that peaked at 46 million rps in June, the record as of June 14 of last year was 26 million rps. One in every four clients of Cloudflare reports having been the target of a Ransom DDOS assault or threats, as the number of Ransom DDoS attacks has also increased.