Cloudflare reports it successfully mitigated a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 15.3 million requests per second (RPS).
This incident represents the largest HTTPS-based DDoS attack Cloudflare has encountered. HTTPS attacks demand greater computational resources because establishing each secure TLS connection requires additional processing, making these attacks more costly for attackers and harder for victims to handle.
The attack targeted a Cloudflare customer that operates a cryptocurrency launchpad, a platform that presents decentralized finance (DeFi) projects to potential investors. Cloudflare says the assault was carried out by a botnet it had already been monitoring and lasted under 15 seconds.
Most of the attack traffic originated from data centers in Indonesia, followed by sources in Russia, Brazil, India, Colombia, and the United States.
Cloudflare highlighted that the attack’s source distribution was notable: a large portion of traffic came from cloud and data center providers rather than residential ISPs. The company has observed a significant shift away from residential networks toward cloud compute providers as the primary platforms for launching large-scale attacks.
Although this was Cloudflare’s largest HTTPS attack to date, it is not the largest DDoS event the company has recorded. The overall peak remains an application-layer DDoS that reached 17.2 million RPS in September 2021, illustrating how the scale and frequency of cyberattacks continue to grow.
“While the majority of attacks are small and short, we continue to see these types of volumetric attacks emerging more often,” Cloudflare stated. They warned that short, high-volume burst attacks can be particularly harmful to legacy DDoS protection systems or organizations that lack always-on, cloud-based mitigation services.
(Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash)
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