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A Friday distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack hit a record 7.3 terabits per second.
Internet security firm Cloudflare says it stopped the 45-second DDoS attack, which translated to roughly 37.4 terabytes of data. To put this in perspective, that’s about 375 modern AAA video games, which can weigh in at 100GB each, or up to 311 days of 1080p HD video. It's also equivalent to around 9.35 million songs stored as MP3s.
DDoS attacks are one of the most prevalent types of cyber threats. They attempt to flood a website with traffic from different IP addresses across the world, in the hopes that it will crash. These types of attacks have taken down everything from Microsoft's Azure and Elon Musk's X to the Internet Archive in the past few years alone.
(Credit: Cloudflare)Cloudflare didn’t reveal the victim of Friday’s attack, other than to say it was a Cloudflare customer, like most major high-traffic websites on the internet. The attack is what Cloudflare termed a "multivector DDoS attack," but said that 99.996% of the malicious attack traffic was executed via what is known as "UDP floods."
UDP is a way of routing internet traffic where fast responses are needed, such as online gaming or Zoom calls, in contrast to TCP, which is used for the majority of online traffic.
The internet security firm says the attack originated from over 122,145 source IP addresses across 161 countries. Almost half of the attack traffic came from Brazil and Vietnam, with roughly a quarter each. Another third originated from Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Ukraine, Ecuador, Thailand, the United States, and Saudi Arabia.
Cloudflare has reported several record-breaking DDoS attacks over the past year. In late January, Cloudflare warded off a 5.6Tbps attack, a record at the time, just months after fending off a 4.2Tbps attack. Meanwhile, tech giants like Microsoft are warning that DDoS attacks may be used offensively by technologically advanced foreign powers like Iran, North Korea, or Russia.