DDOS attacks achieve a new size. Cloudflare has fended off another record attack with 11.5 terabits per second. The amount of data exceeds all previous attacks and illustrates the growing threat.
New DDOS record
The size of DDOS attacks continues to grow. It was only in June that Cloudflare had reported the greatest attack of all time, in which 37 terabytes were transferred in just 45 seconds. But this record is already history. Cloudflare recently thwarted another attack that shifts the borders again. The new UDP flood record attack was temporarily up to 11.5 terabits. As much data per second as with this attack have never been sent before. So far, the maximum was 7.3 terabits. The incident took about 35 seconds and reached top values of 5.1 billion packages per second.
UDP flood attacks are a special type of DDOS attack that overloads the target system with a flood of user-datagram protocol packages. UDP is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite, which is often used for tasks such as video streaming or online gaming, in which speed has priority over reliability. Use UDP to send an incessant current of packages and overload the network.
Explosion -like increase in the number of attacks
The development of DDOS attacks shows a dramatic upward trend. The number of attacks worldwide rose by 108 percent in 2024 compared to 2023. Cloudflare thwarted 20.5 million DDOS attacks, which corresponds to an increase of 358 percent in the year.
That means massive acceleration. Even before the current record attack, Cloudflare had thwarted several attacks. For example, an 80-second UDP-based attack on October 29, 2024, which reached 5.6 terabits per second and came from over 13,000 IoT devices.
IoT devices as a preferred attack platform
How Bleeping computer reports, the attacks are made possible by the growing availability of compromised IoT devices. The Botnets consist of malware variants that are derived from Mirai and Bashlite and infect IoT devices by using weaknesses and weak access data. The safety of IoT devices is often due to the development due to cost, size and computing power restrictions.
Since these devices are connected to the Internet and have low safety levels, they are increasingly being compromised by malignant malware and part of large and small botnets. By the fourth quarter of 2024, the average number of devices connected to a single botnet reached 38,000. This is an average value between “mega-botnets” with tens of million devices and smaller networks with just a few thousand infected units.
Professionalization of cybercrime
The attacks are increasingly being organized and are also terrifyingly inexpensive. The attackers can rent online resources for just five dollars an hour to start attacks. These low hurdles stand in blatant contrast to the devastating effects for the victims. Affected websites and services such as online retailers lose income every hour of a loss.
This explains why DDOS attacks are increasingly being used for blackmails and the cybersecurity will present new challenges. The asymmetry between the low costs for attackers and the high damage to companies makes DDOS attacks a lucrative business model for cybercriminals.
