(Credit: courtneyk/Getty Images)
A hacker pulled off a record 11.5Tbps DDoS attack, up 60% from the previous peak.
On Monday, internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare reported the record-shattering distributed denial of service attack, which appears to have occurred sometime last month.
The attack lasted only 35 seconds, but reached a peak of 11.5Tbps while pushing 5.1 billion packets per second, hammering both network bandwidth and packet-processing capacity. Details are thin, including who the attack targeted. But a DDoS is often designed to overwhelm an internet service, such as a website or mobile app, with the goal of taking it offline.
Although Cloudflare autonomously blocked the attack, the incident shows that someone is finding a way to drastically increase the power of a DDoS. The previous record-holder for a DDoS attack was a 7.3Tbps assault that Cloudflare detected and blocked in May.
Cloudflare plans to share more details later. But in the meantime, the company says the hacker generated the DDoS by exploiting User Datagram Protocol (UDP) packets, which are used for video and audio streaming, as well as video conferencing.
The attack involved summoning a flood of UDP packets with the goal of overwhelming the target server. Oftentimes, hackers can generate DDoS traffic through botnets, or armies of malware-infected computers, including IoT devices, such as security cameras. In this case, Cloudflare traced the DDoS to "a combination of several IoT and cloud providers," including Google Cloud.
"While Google Cloud was one source, it was not the majority," Cloudflare added.
A Google spokesperson also told PCMag: "Defending against this class of attack is an ongoing priority for us, and we’ve deployed numerous strong defenses to keep users safe, including robust DDoS detection and mitigation capabilities. Our abuse defenses detected the attack, and we followed proper protocol in customer notification and response. Initial reports suggesting that the majority of traffic came from Google Cloud are not accurate."